Over the last few years (or more) Top Cow has been going through a change. Shifting their focus from superhero and horror related books and going for more of a sci-fi theme. At the heart of that change has been Matt Hawkins. President of Top Cow, Matt got into the industry as the writer/creator of Lady Pendragon. If you follow him on Facebook or sit down and have a beer with him, the odds are you're going to learn something. Matt is the type that researches the hell out of every project which makes him one of the best sci-fi writers in comics today. I learned this from having worked with him on Tales of Honor, adapting the expansive world of Honor Harrington created by David Weber. His work on Aphrodite IX and IXth Generation has pulled the Top Cow universe over from Clive Barker to Isaac Asminov and Think Tank would fit well on a shelf next to Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein.

So I was happy to get a chance to do an early exclusive advanced review of his latest sci-fi project Symmetry. The series is co-created with artist Raffaelo Ienco and is for all intent and purpose, a negative utopian series. Think George Orwell's 1984 or William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson's Logan's Run. Society has eliminated war, famine and disease by giving up personal freedom and individualism. In the Symmetry society humans are genderless until thirteen, they are implanted with a microcomputer called Raina at birth that guides them through life and are taken from their parents at age three and raised in groups. Relationships are no longer forever, most are just for reproductive purposes.

The society thrives because of their computer and robotic assistance and that they have given up all the things that have caused war over the years… money, land, power, religion. But it's called a negative utopia because all of this is on the surface while there is something far more sinister beneath. And that starts to come to life when a solar flare causes an electromagnetic pulse to engulf the planet.

A book like this is usually easier to do in a novel. Readers make more of a commitment to a novel because they own the whole story. With a comic you have one issue to hook someone and you can't take the path of building up the perfect society and then tearing it down as you would in prose… because your reader would get bored and never buy issue two. Hawkins and Ienco handle that perfectly within the first four pages. We start with a narration that say "My brother Matthew died five years ago today." And then we are thrust into a city that at first glance could have been an issue of Sinbad, but then we see huge floating transports, a man in all white racing through the city market and a series of cybernetic looking Slender Men chasing him. In four pages we get an old world filled with new tech, a conformed society, the hint of a conspiracy, a narrator to follow and a death of someone that narrator loved. That's a pretty good hook for readers.

From there we watch as the perfect society is built up yet we know that it's a lie and that makes learning about it all the more interesting.

Hawkins writing is spot on here. He gets the emotional tugs in all the right places. But his writing is only half of what makes this good. Ienco's art is strong here and his ability to make this jumble world fit together adds a lot to the book. The characters can be a bit stiff and I'm not sure how they would work in a more action based series, but here the color, depth and texture fit perfectly.

Symmetry #1 is a strong set up for a negative utopian series that is well worth picking up. The next step will be creating a sinister secret powerful enough to tear the utopia down… we get a hint of what that is on the last page, but we'll have to wait until issue two to find out more.