Eve #1-5: The Work to Do, The Seeds to Grow

From the same questions and the social grasp of urgency and doomness that is the seed of stories like The Walking Dead, Eve has all the elements of post-apocalyptic fiction, zombies, artificial intelligence, cloning, ethical questions… deep inside its roots. The main difference between other pieces that pose similar questions and Eve is the hopeful resolution and the trust in, particularly, the youth. The apocalypse here is none that the one we know so intimately: the climate emergency that is gonna affect further generations, and the story makes sure to remind us this could be our future. But LaValle also puts a lot of effort in posing a solution and putting it in the hands of a child we can deeply empathize with, in a way that is not patronizing but truly admiring and reflexive.

Then, Eve is also one of the most majestic and humbling pieces of visual art. Jo Mi-Gyeong captures the apocalyptic, the strange, the robotic, as well as the nature, the brightness, the humanity and emotion, in a story that is as filled with different angles and nuances as its characters are relatable and easy to understand and put in their shoes. And then, the shadowing, the mastery of matching color palettes within themselves and with characters’ emotions, the ability to make the page shine bright and calm as a sunny day or get dark and bloody as the most gloomy emotions, all of that is perfectly executed by Brittany Peer’s colors. I truly believe Peer is one of the best colorists of this generation, and here in Eve, her work with Mi-Gyeong’s detailed art is top of the game at every turn. All of that perfectly introduced by Ario Anindito and Pierluigi Casolino’s epic and realistic covers.

Honestly, this book couldn’t be so overwhelmingly strong and purpose-focused without the way that the scenes get filled with sunlight, dim with the roughness, visibly mutate with the journey. Eve wants us to understand things beyond our usual scope but that could be so close to us, and to have hope even in our darkest fears, and the strong creative team behind it has absolutely succeeded in both things for me.