Crowded #1

by Christopher Sebela

[Quirky Cat]

Crowded is a new series by Image, and it’s jokingly described as being ‘ten minutes in the future.’ In this not too far off future, Charlie finds herself the target of a mass hit. You see, people in this age can crowdfund anything and everything, including hits. Those hits last as month long campaigns. During that time it seems like anybody that wants the money just has to…well…they sort of have to kill the target. In this case that means they have to kill Charlie.
They did a great job establishing this series. I don’t love Charlie, but I’m also clearly not supposed to. She’s hiding something, either intentionally or not. Sure, there’s a chance she really doesn’t know the reason behind all of this, or that she’s lying to herself, or something along those lines. But none of those would explain the sheer number of people willing to help fund her campaign, now would it? So we have danger, mystery, and a lot of sass all rolled into one issue, and we haven’t even talked about the other main character.
I love Vita’s character. They’re competent as hell, and while they may have a bad rating on Dfender (another app you can hire people for – in this case it’s specifically to hire body guards), but as they put it; those people were alive to leave those bad ratings. It’s a pretty solid point. Vita clearly cares more about keeping their targets alive than by keeping them happy. Given the alternative, I’m okay with that. Clearly their clients are too stupid to see it that way.
It’ll be interesting to see how these two work together in the long run, as clearly they’re quite different from one another. I think Vita can keep Charlie alive, assuming that Charlie stops acting dumb for at least one minute. We’ll see how that goes.
Along with being intriguing, this series did a good job of dropping some humorous moments. My favorite was probably the first attempt on Charlie’s life. It doesn’t sound funny when you put it like that, but it ended with coffee being thrown into somebody’s face and Charlie running off with the would be assassin’s dog. I think that’s a fair exchange, don’t you? And yes, the dog seems to be hanging around. I wonder if that’ll come back to bite them in the end? No pun intended. But seriously, I can see the owner having one of those dog trackers, especially given the tech in this near future.
I can’t wait for the next issue to come out. I really want to see what happens next. I’m already invested in what happens to these characters, and I may or may not be shipping them already. Totally not ashamed of that or anything.

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