Wake (comic)
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Wake (Sillage in the original French) is a science fiction graphic novel series created by Jean-David Morvan and Philippe Buchet. The series has been translated to English and published in the united States by NBM Publishing. The issues are published in a large format (19 cm by 25.4 cm) as soft cover graphic novels. Issues 1 through 3 were published individually. Issues 4/5 and 6/7 were published together as single books. Issues 8 and 9 have been released in French but have not yet reached the United States.
The series Wake is hard science fiction, exploring social themes with a definite Eurocentric viewpoint. The fact that the adolescent female protagonist, Navee, spends the entire first issue living topless in the jungle planet where she grew up as a castaway resulted in the series being classified as pornography in comic shops in the United States. However, the content of the series is no more sexually graphic than similar science fiction series like Planetes and 2001 Nights.
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[edit] Navee
The protagonist of the series is Navee (Nävis in the original French), a young human female who was shipwrecked and orphaned on an alien planet. She was raised from infancy by the ship’s robots and has never met another human being. The series uses Navee as an outside viewer of the Wake convoy as she adjusts to life in this alien civilization.
Navee is the only living example of the human race known to Wake. She is also unique in being neither a "psi active" nor a "psi passive"; that is, she has no telepathic abilities, but her mind cannot be read either. This lack of psionic talent of any sort comes in handy at times during the series.
Navee has white rectangular tattoos on her body. In the English version, the white stripe across her breasts was made black, to cover her nipples in the scenes when she went topless in the jungles of her home world. Later in the series, Navee uncovers evidence that the tattoos are caste or tribal markings of some sort from the unknown human civilization her parents were a part of.
As the series begins, Navee has survived into adolescence and all the technology on her wrecked ship has finally failed. She lives a primitive life in the jungle of her world with her companion Poukram, a sentient six-limbed tiger-like being. Her idyllic life ends when agents of Wake, a traveling civilization of many different alien species, arrive to terraform her planet for colonization. Prior to encountering Navee, Wake had extremely limited contact with humanity.
After some first contact friction, Navee is awarded salvage rights to her wrecked spacecraft and joins Wake with enough money to pay for her education and to commission a custom spacecraft for her to live in. When her money runs out, she goes to work for the Wake government as an agent and explorer within the Wake convoy and on technologically primitive worlds.
[edit] Wake
The Wake Civilization is a vast convoy of spacecraft that constantly travel around the galaxy in search of resources, races, and technology. This convoy drops hypergates as it travels, allowing instantaneous access to previously visited star systems. It is unclear whether Wake has any faster than light capability beyond the hypergates. The Wake civilization is very old. There are hints that it has circled the galaxy many times, and revisited many stellar systems over time periods sufficient to watch civilizations rise and fall. There is also evidence that Wake has terraformed planets and seeded life on them over a very long period of time.
As a synthesis of vast numbers of races with a long history, Wake is extremely advanced technologically. No two ships of Wake are designed the same, and some are clearly biological. Several ships and species are encountered in the convoy that are so different that communication is difficult or impossible, yet they are clearly a part of the civilization. Artificial intelligences are used everywhere, but are considered second class citizens and kept under control by the biological citizens. Advanced biological information storage and processing technologies are seen several times throughout the series.
The communication technology of Wake relies heavily on psionics, produced and manipulated by both biological and technological means. The citizens of Wake are classified by their ability to control the behavior of other beings through psionic powers and their susceptibility to control by the same means. This division of people into powerful and helpless categories is a consistent theme throughout the series. The exclusive use of psionics for communication is hinted at as one of the possible reasons why Wake and humanity have never discovered each other, as Navee (and presumably all humans) are totally immune to psionic coercion and equally unable to manipulate or communicate with other beings through these means. This ability makes Navee valuable as an intelligence agent of Wake’s military and use of this talent allows her to make a living.
[edit] Commentary
The Wake civilization is a metaphor for the community of European nations, and the series explores several topics from the European point of view:
• The ethics of colonization • The treatment of 3rd world peoples by the 1st world • The concept of social justice • Corruption in government
Navee’s methods of solving problems involve fomenting revolutions by introducing new ideas to downtrodden peoples as often as they do violence. This may also be considered a European influence on the series.
[edit] Series style and sub-genres
In an interview or commentary published in bilingual form (English and French) in a collection of his drawings (blockBuster, 2005) Buchet noted that science fiction had the peculiarity of "allowing a natural journey between past and future". The science fiction traditions of cryogenics and social manipulation at a grand scale made it possible for him and Morvan to explore the sub-genre of steampunk in "gearing up", while the tradition of barbaric pre-industrial planets made an exploration of "sword and sorcery" possible in The sign of the Demons, and so on.
[edit] Issues Published in English
• 1: Fire and Ash (2000) ISBN 1-56163-267-8
Navee lives an idyllic life on her jungle planet until an agent of Wake comes to terraform and colonize it. Navee resists by starting a revolution among the alien workers, and then joins Wake when her planet is destroyed.
• 2: Private Collection (2001) ISBN 1-56163-282-1
Navee comes to the attention of a powerful psionic male who has used his power of compulsion to build a harem of females of different species. She resists his attentions, sometimes violently. Navee runs out of money and must take a job with the Wake military as an intelligence agent.
• 3: Gearing Up (2002) ISBN 1-56163-315-1
A routine check on a known world discovers a steampunk civilization whose technology is advancing impossibly fast while the people mutate into a hybrid form similar to humanity. New agent Navee is sent to discover what is happening.
• 4: The sign of the demons (2003) ISBN 1-56163-341-0
Navee and her team of fellow Wake agents investigate the preindustrial world of Hurumaru, inhabited by many different sentient races which are known to have originated elsewhere. The inhabitants have no knowledge of Wake or of their homeworlds. The usual revolution is fomented to free the downtrodden and discover who has been planting illegal colonies.
• 5: <alien text> (2003) ISBN 1-56163-341-0
Investigating terrorist attacks throughout wake leads to the discovery of the Ftross, an oppressed underclass living in squalor within the ships of the convoy itself. Navee tries but is unable to make much progress in cleaning up the inequities of the Wake civilization.
• 6: Artifice (2005) ISBN 1-56163-420-4
On the way to visit her old friend Rib’Wund, Navee’s space ship is sabotaged and she crash lands on a post-apocalyptic planet. She encounters a desperate population of beings who have spent centuries at war on the brink of extinction against robots. The males are extremely protective of her, as a female, but she manages to blow apart the status quo and end the war.
• 7: Maximum (In)Security (2005) ISBN 1-56163-420-4
Navee finally arrives at the maximum security prison ship to visit her friend Rib’Wund, only to learn the entire prison has erupted in a riot. Suspecting the riot is a cover for an assassination, Navee infiltrates the prison and makes her way through the population of biological killing machines to find her friend.
• 8: Human Nature (?)
Forthcoming
• 9: Infiltration (?)
Forthcoming
[edit] Bilingual publication of Buchet's drawing
blockBuster. Guy Delcourt Productions, 2005. ISBN 2-84789-949-9
