Reviewed by Taylor Hoffman // @taylorcheckers

The Surface #3 continues a challenging and refreshing sci-fi adventure into the meld between subconscious thought and perceived reality, and again, Ales Kot (Zero, Material, Change) questions the nature of reality. The background is more than the basic science fiction futuristic world that three young people try to escape Matrix style. What form does a consciousness take? How do we perceive it in ourselves and as readers? This is a stand-out series that constantly evolves and the theories of space and safety metamorphose from expansive internal webbings to constraining overarching flying buttresses controlled by a greed ridden few. There’s a perpetual rhythm to this comic pairs well with a lack of sleep; it’s as much a damnation on our limited grasp of our mental temporal being as a satire of our decaying/replenishing physical state. Kot and the rest of this excellent team want us to think about underneath our feet: what is the secret to the surface? Can you remember?

Story by: Ales Kot

Art by: Langdon Foss

Colors by: Jordie Bellaire

Publisher: Image Comics

Price: $3.50

Release Date: 6/17/15

Have you read House of Leaves? Arguably, it’s a satire of academia that leads to nowhere, but that’s an unsatisfying ending to a fiction that we so desperately want to explain our meaning of existence. Kot has clicked into a Jacques Derrida spiral of the main issues of translation, the near impossible, but not inconceivable task of relating multiple layers of meaning of senses through a text that is inherently one of the most brain-stimulating mediums. In the metaphysics that The Surface’s garden of Eden outward goal of peace in its discovery, the surface, challenges the idea of presence. See, it’s all morphing together? Is this a just jumbled reading of postmodernism and the semiotics of deconstruction, or are the ties between them like tightropes, never ending and changing in length, crossing and crossing –– the hologram that Kot previously posed as the makeup for the brain in the first issue, thus the prescription of reality falls into the same structure. Why can’t it be both theories simultaneously, just falling through each other on several plains?

The Surface should live on in the grand scheme of literature, subcategory comics in a niche of metafictional experience. This is a book that can end now in final and eternal reflection, torn between deconstructionist and desperate attempt at forming the structural. Every character is tied in this idea of the surface, motivated by a basic want to know, experience, and own. What comes with the surface? Where is it? Concerning the where, tangibility that follows direct coordinates is what consumes the seemingly overall patriarch, father and creator of the lifelog system. A master of control who can’t actually control what he wants, mainly his son’s actions.

“Why is this story being told?”

The surface that our surviving main focus Nasia has lost her lovers and is now stuck in a bondage by self-proclaimed leaders, higher-ups, an ouroboros fueled by greed. It’s all beautifully constructed by Langdon Foss that shows her both tied overtly sexual desire and an unwanted tethered torture. The surface is undefinable, but these images are concrete representations of a certain feeling of constant surveillance. Though Nasia was one to abandon her lifelog and escape to Tanzania to essentially disconnect from the grid, the opening spread to this issue is a jarring reminder that privacy doesn’t exist in this world.

“When you look under the surface of things, what do you see?”

It’s a search for context in The Surface, an on-going mission that could be finding an immutable truth that there is only more depth. We’re following several beings –– not just characters in a story, but textually alive for all intents and purposes, presences –– on the same mission. The Surface is a work that beautifully unveils depth and evokes a sense of familiarity and dread of constantly confronted with how to examine the self in relation to an Other with an unwavering necessity for dramatic irony.

It’s a headache of “how imagination comes into being.” What is accepted as magic defies the necessity for belief in scientific infallibility.

There’s complex and wonderfully crafted story-telling, but as the omnipresent whispers of an author who isn’t exposed. Could it be in the creators: Kot’s questioning? Clayton Clowes connecting messages in the similarities between lettering and text bubbles? Jordie Bellaire’s carefully exposing the true colors of obsession and grief juxtaposed to that of freedom? What has Tom Muller designed, a matrix?

There will never be exact coordinates. The series will end, but the ideas and questioning this team has created will live on. For now, let’s bask in this issue. I doubt any two people will have the same reading, which is a sign of a damn good book. Reading The Surface is a reminder that interpretation is key to our existence and important to gather perspectives. Here, so much is laid out and layered, and there’s the explicit invitation to keep learning.

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Taylor’s a Valkyrie at Black Cat Comics in SLC, UT. Follow her on twitter @taylorcheckers for cute chinchilla pictures and more about comics.