Review by Ian Keogh
Naledi cares for her mother in the bleak and barely inhabited world of a century in the future. Despite their destitute condition, they regularly pray to the gods, and a consultation with a spiritualist reveals a disturbing ignorance on the part of those gods. Naledi is told they are unaware of mankind’s imminent demise. To rectify that she must locate the living gods, and her plant knows the way. However, Naledi’s is a desperate society ill inclined to look kindly on strangers when every penny scrabbled means survival for a brief time longer.
From the start Isaac Mogajane develops a unique perspective by having Naledi speak using a variety of phrases from languages spoken in Southern Africa, and he continues to build the world around the cultures of the people using those languages. What might otherwise be a standard episodic fantasy quest is coloured by the environment and the the people.
Brazilian artist Santtos buys into this world creation via mixing the traditional and the futuristic. Warriors with tribal markings have bionic parts and play pool with floating holographic balls. Like Mogajane, the methods are nuanced, supplied in passing with no great attention drawn to them, but combining to build a world. The art is sketchy and loose, yet detailed, and emotionally strong, bringing out personalities.
Naledi being albino enhances her exotic status, and Mogajane emphasises how that more than anything else aids her quest, bringing her into contact with dangerous, but well connected people she’d not otherwise have been able to access. We see the inexplicable, but do the gods really exist?
Naledi eventually becomes one of an ensemble cast unknowingly heading toward something pivotal, and the skill is that readers see so much from different perspectives that there’s surely no way everything can be wrapped up in the single volume. It can and it can’t. This concludes almost everything set in motion surprisingly and satisfyingly, yet also seems just the first part of something bigger. Either way, it’s worth your time, and both creators set markers as people to follow.
