Review by Frank Plowright

Want a cracking SF-themed crime thriller? Look no further.

Set in the 2040s, Man:Plus opens with a squad of heavily armed cyborgs shooting up a city street while attempting to take a female android into custody. This is in Olissipo, which has grown from nothing into Portugal’s largest city and a global tech-hub, and there’s very little in Olissipo beneath the notice of the man who heads its founding corporation.

Break down Man:Plus, and it’s a relatively simple story of police attempting to do the right thing faced with obstruction from powerful vested interests with considerable resources. However, André Lima Araújo inflates it into something memorable through deep background and evocative art. He explains how Olisspo developed, designs the city of the future, yet ensures for all the wonder of the technology that it’s place where people live, and some areas have become run down.

Araújo’s art features consistently stylised people within an individualised colour scheme that will either appeal or not, but with impeccable storytelling, and an innate knowledge of what to emphasise. There’s considerable detail in the individual adornments of the cyborgs, or the city streets, yet when the eye needs to focus on specific characters there’s nothing else to distract. Credit also for this not being the standard police force of hunks and a babe, either, with the chief an elderly woman.

The only point at which Man:Plus falters is at the very end, when Araújo introduces consideration of machines having a soul alongside programming, and at the crossover point between man and machine. It’s handled interestingly, but for full impact really needed to have been a discussion more explicitly held throughout.

So much work has been put into a world designed for further stories, so it’s shame Araújo has never revisited Olisspo.