Shin Zero Book 1
Writer: Mathieu Bablet
Artist: Guillaume Singelin
Translator: Dan Christensen
English Re-Lettering: Chris Northrop
Publisher: Magnetic Press
Publication Date: March 2026
The gig economy has and continues to make great fodder for comics. There are almost too many examples to list, from early days character-driven pieces like Crowded to more recent, tech commentary stories like Gigs. It is perhaps unsurprising that an industry driven in no small part by underpaid contract employees would have the ongoing shift in consumptive labor on its mind.
Like all ideas that catch on and spread throughout comics, however, imitators with less to say start to become common, and so I’ve started to feel of late that comics about the gig economy have a higher bar to clear. I’m not adverse to more of these stories, I’m just becoming a little wary of them as opportunistic. The idea of uberizing things like contract murder, superheroing, or whatever else isn’t enough to feel novel, not without something new to say within the increasingly-familiar framework.
And that slightly fatigued mindset is the one I brought to this year’s Shin Zero Book 1, which was translated into English from French by publisher Magnetic Press, powered by a six-digit Kickstarter campaign. The first of three planned installments, Shin Zero is by writer Mathieu Bablet and artist Guillaume Singelin, and it has an impeccable tagline: “Shin Zero – a graphic novel for the Rent-a-Sentai Generation. Sentai never die — but they might not always get 5 star-ratings.”
It’s a clever high concept. It’s essentially what if you could hire the Power Rangers with an app. Fortunately, Bablet and Singelin’s execution of this concept was excellent, and while this is just one third of a bigger story, it feels interested in finding new character-driven territory as it raises questions about the gig economy.
There’s a lot to like about this book, but I think it’s biggest strength — aside from Singelin’s loose, manga-inspired cartooning, with a perfect restrained use of color — is the characterization. There is at times a tendency in this new genre of comics to make the characters pure victims, and I understand it. The gig economy is naked with its exploitation, and it’s also cold. Within it, modern work has sunk to new levels of impersonable. People don’t have human bosses, not really, not aside from the app and the often-faceless users of it, who have their meals left on doorsteps or their rides given without a single word exchanged.
But Shin Zero gives its teen sentai real, interesting idiosyncrasies and, most importantly, flaws. It’s so bold with making its characters flawed, that I kept waiting for redemptive moments that never quite came, not in any neat way. And with this creative choice, Shin Zero finds something thrilling, offering a tantalizing hint that it wants to reach for new questions about the gig economy, around not how it exploits us but how it exists within ugliness we as a people haven’t worked out. It is a pure vampire, or is it made possible in total by our own worst tendencies, even when we’re on the losing end of it?
Indeed, the book doesn’t look to assign blame. It treats the gig economy as almost settled law, and also as a thing that’s not good for us. Then it explores its own characters choices within that reality.
That is all, of course, just my own reading of this book thematically, with a guess at where it may be headed. But even if I’m entirely off-base, I think the comic works well on a surface level. The sentai in this book suffer interesting indignities, and there’s also a great overarching narrative around the history of what they’re doing. Shin Zero is built on a well-done internal mythology, wherein the heyday of sentai and kaiju was the 1990s, and in 2026, the world is still feeling the reverberations of that. Some characters are chasing faded glories, others are following an aging sentai parent’s footsteps, and more still are just trying to get by.
I also found the ’90s as the sentai glory days to be interesting, given the trendy popularity of Power Rangers in that decade (I lived it), and I appreciated that meta layer to the book.
All told, Shin Zero Book 1 is one of the must-read new comics for 2026 so far, and, most excitingly, the start of a bigger, three-book story, one I will be following through to its end.
Shin Zero Book 1 is out now via Magnetic Press
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