Webcomic Wednesday: Abyss by Saman Bemel-Benrud

I’m 35 years old, and so the novelty of treating handheld information-technology devices and instant communication as potential sources of tremendous, even transformative emotional power – as opposed to, like, inevitably the most annoying lyric of any Destiny’s Child song circa the turn of the millennium – has still not quite worn off for me. Cartoonist Saman Bemel-Benrud fascinates me because this phenomenon is his muse, and the generic vocabulary of science fiction and fantasy is how he follows it. A look through the catalog of his work available online reveals a variety of approaches to transforming instant message text boxes, MMO stats, and the like into portals, into weapons, into magic spells. I think the most effective of these strips is Abyss, 30-plus pages of a young urban couple staring into the titular maw of a vacant lot slated to become a condo and discovering that – well, you know what they say about abysses and gazes.

Bemel-Benrud’s work draws a lot of its oomph from the contrast between his all-pencil line and simple figures on the one hand and the cold digital user-interface smoothness of the technology he’s picking at, and that’s certainly the case here; it’s fascinating to see how different artists approach the problem of hand-drawing the communication of computers. Abyss benefits also from playing with the specific phenomena of mass metropolitan culture: Chipotle, smartphones, AR advertising, those damn condo lots. But its primary power lies in its presentation of these mundane markers of late capitalism into vessels of wonder and terror – abysses that can be fallen into, home to ghosts that open one’s eyes to new states of being enabled by the same device you used to pre-order your burrito. Is it a dream, or a nightmare? And if it transforms your life, is that a distinction without a difference?