Review by Karl Verhoven

Gigs is a selection box of stories extrapolating current British society, providing a future where most people are only ever temporarily employed for hours at a time on specific tasks sent through to their phones. Mark Mosedale has plenty more depressing revelations about what’s coming in our future, subtly passing them on, beginning with sisters Ivy and Sara going about their daily grind.

Without any hope, what’s there to do? Well Mosedale heads back to a previous time of no hope via an unrepentant punk still breaking rules in a nursing home advising Ivy to take a listen to some music from 1977. It’s a rebellious act when so much of the past appears whitewashed or plain unavailable.

What at first seems a single story breaks into chapters featuring different, but connected people, at which point it’s apparent Gigs concerns a densely constructed world, while Si Smith’s pages show an artist really putting the effort in to tell a story as well as it can be told. An early and recurring presence of drones by the dozen indicates that, and he designs people well and varies his approach. If a splash is needed for the picture of a thousand words, it’s there, but Smith also drops to multiple panels on a page indicating movement, as on the sample art with the bright scarf as recurring motif. That sequence further represents the sophisticated storytelling by indicating a jump back in time as the protagonist is spraying a building when the completed art has already been seen.

Much of Gigs mythologises a pre-digital world, and while there’s a considerable element of picking and choosing about what Mosedale mythologises, that’s what everyone does. What’s personally important survives while the surrounding noise fades away. “A good game. It doesn’t tell the player the truth about the maker”, we’re told, “It tells the player the truth about the player”, a maxim to be extrapolated to the reader of a good graphic novel. Mosedale has been looking ahead into the world we’re drifting toward and its connection points, and it’s up to you to decide if you like what you see. The underclass are the subjects, and in the future that’s going to be increasingly more of us, but Gigs isn’t just a warning, it supplies solutions, some again looking back to the past, and all requiring some form of personal change.

Intelligent connections continue until the final pages employing the nuance used throughout to look back in on everyone we’ve seen before. Gigs is sophisticated social guidance with a human heart, and for anyone with concerns about where we’re headed it couldn’t have been handled better.