Huck and Nadia are a highly sexual couple working for a tech/social media giant (basically Google/YouTube). Though their group-sex experimentation fantasies remain just that, a friend one day gifts them a prototype sex doll that can morph into a number of set models. And then Nadia hacks the menu so that anyone with images on the internet can be turned into their sex doll. Oh, the depravity of the future!
Julian Hanshaw’s latest comic Free Pass is (I think) a critique of contemporary Western culture and the murky areas it’s headed. I liked parts of it but also found others fairly unremarkable.
I was intrigued with the main storyline of where Huck and Nadia’s lives and relationship would go once they became obsessed with the sex doll. It ultimately doesn’t go anywhere or say anything profound, but I was at least interested in finding out what happened next, and it wasn’t totally underwhelming.
Other aspects of the book are less impressive. There’s a countdown to the “election” in lieu of chapters, possibly alluding to the way that social media shapes our real world via perceptions of political candidates, stoking fires in voters, driving those divisions deeper and making our world extremely partisan. I agree, but that’s quite a banal point, if that is what Hanshaw’s shooting for - otherwise, I have no idea why this election stuff is in the book.
Similarly obvious is the observation that tech companies seem to expect and rigidly enforce a certain (extreme leftwing) viewpoint in its workers, and that policing free speech online is a tricky line to walk. Fair enough, but again it’s another banal point to make - Hanshaw’s not saying anything new or enlightening about this topic.
Huck is fixated on percentages of birds making it to life and, even then, their lives are brutal and short, which is another seemingly pointless tangent unless it’s symbolic of the “approved” comments that don’t get deleted from social media by him/his company and he’s saying - what, that the experience social media is providing is limiting life, or something?
That’s the main problem with this book: Hanshaw’s points are either clear and obvious or vague and muddled, and none of it gels together well. Maybe he’s saying the internet has warped our sexual selves, although Huck and Nadia seem to be an unusual couple and were the way they are prior to the sex doll anyway. I agree that online social discourse and democratic political systems could use a shake-up (your choice is one of two parties, really?), but Hanshaw’s conclusion - that anticlimactic ending - isn’t a solution, or at least not an effective one.
Hanshaw’s at his best when he’s centred on storytelling and Huck and Nadia’s sexual sci-fi adventure was mostly compelling, though it could’ve been better if the book had been more focused on this rather than including those uninteresting political discussions drizzled in throughout. And I do like Hanshaw’s unusual art with his odd-looking characters and wonderful use of colour.
Free Pass (as in “hall pass” where you would allow your partner to sleep with someone, usually a celeb, without consequence) is original for the most part and I enjoyed the main story, but it’s not very successful in making a powerful or thoughtful contemporary statement on Western culture that I think Julian Hanshaw hoped it would. Still, it’s worth a look if you’re interested in this creator.
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