Receiving Transmissions: Slice-Of-Mystery

What captivates me about Receiving Transmissions is its capacity to reflect the supernatural and extraordinary into the daily, keeping both encouraging messages and familiarity with mystery and the inexplicable. Instead of simply a metaphor of daily struggles through sci-fi, this story mixes up both spheres and intertwines them. A simple premise like those letters and their connection to Scotty’s childhood gets connected to how she deals with daily life, work, love, self-esteem.

There’s sweetness in how Steenz! connects Scotty’s favourite childhood show, a reference that shapes and defines her, with this disrupting element that little by little turns calming and hopeful. Everyone puts faith in things irrational or out of our control, and on the TW shows we saw as little humans, and here we see that faith materialized. And going out of the screen to help, and reach out, and the unknown gets close to the heart.

The drawing is mostly slice-of-life and cuteness, cartoon-ish style, that reflects the change in moods of the characters and the different mental health and mood moments Scotty goes through as the mysterious letters arrive. Steenz! puts incredible care for spaces, visual narrative and visual signing (like when the month pass in a beautiful way between Scotty and her girlfriend Jenn, or the numerous visual exclamations, laughs, tension moments), in a way that it always supports the mood of the story and helps get to the tense ending. I kinda like the negative-playing with ink-experiment in the cover art, but I feel the style of the interior art eats it in a sense of filling itself with emotions, scenarios and weird-y daily stuff, and, in that way, the cover doesn’t fully tease all that you’re gonna find in the inside.