Imagine a world where we are literally raised by apps. Too close to home? Let’s get more specific. Imagine a world where a tech billionaire — like, for example, Mark Zuckerberg — created an army of tech-obsessed teenagers and directed them to take on the government. We’re not talking about creating viral fake news stories; we’re talking about full-fledged war. In writer Sean Lewis’ and artist Hayden Sherman’s new Image Comics series, Thumbs, that’s exactly what happens.
“I was watching a kid play with his phone and how anxious he was waiting for a message back from a friend and it made me think about how anxious all the people I know are,” Lewis (Coyotes, Saints, The Few) said in a statement. “I started thinking about the internet and our obsession and reliance on it and the realities of who controls the flow and embedding of information. Was our anxiety planted? Has tech become such an obsession for us that we’d go to war to keep it? Just watching that kid and all the emotions that three dots on a screen were creating made me wonder—do we actually control the tech, even at its smallest levels?”
According to a press release, Thumbs follows Charley “Thumbs” Fellows, who is a member of one of those tech-obsessed armies mentioned above. He is a poor character raised by the MOM™ app who finds himself at the center of a war.
“Thumbs is as much a story about technology as it is about loss, time, and learning your place in the world,” Sherman (The Few) said in a statement. “With the great range of themes and locales that play into these five issues, I’ve taken the chance to expand and really push myself with how a story can be told. The hope is for it to be between storybook and comic book, where it could be either at any given moment.”
Image describes Thumbs as The Social Network meets Black Mirror. The five-issue maxi-series features 40 pages per issue and will debut on June 5. Thumbs #1 can be pre-ordered from your local comic shop using Diamond code APR190011. Final order cutoff deadline for comics retailers is Monday, May 13.
Check out the cover for Thumbs #1 below.
