I’m always telling people how little time, relatively speaking, it takes to read a graphic novel, something that can often make the experience all the more powerful. But I’d be lying if I told you that Square Eyes by Anna Mill and Luke Jones can be gobbled quickly.
This exquisite book, which began its life in 2010 as an entry for the Observer/Cape graphic short story prize, isn’t a very talky comic; its subject matter, which has to do with the dangers of the digital future, dictates that the dialogue is ever minimalist, Mill’s incandescent images doing all the work, and more, of words.
Nevertheless, following the action requires serious concentration, and it may be that some readers will, as I did, struggle to follow the storyline. What precisely happens in its last pages? Even now, I’m not sure I’d be able to tell you.
Perhaps, though, that’s half of the point. Mill, a professional illustrator, and Jones, an architect who co-hosts a podcast called About Buildings + Cities, are dealing in their book in confusion and half-truths, their landscape a desolate near future in which the boundaries between memory, dreams and data have begun dangerously to blur.
When it begins, Fin, a brilliant young woman celebrated for her advances in augmented reality, is off the network and in recovery from some kind of accident. In a series of flashbacks (or are they?), we learn that before the calamity occurred – and what greater calamity could befall a person than for all their digital information seemingly to be lost? – she invented an interface between mind and machine so powerful that part of her believed that in the wrong hands it could destroy the world. Whose are these wrong hands, and have they since wrested control of her creation? Finding out is going to take all her resources, given that she now barely exists. Someone else, she finds, is in her flat, living her life, scrolling through her endless emails.
I’m not recommending Square Eyes for its dystopian plot, for all that it may scare you half to death should you think about it for too long. What truly sets this book apart is its extraordinary illustrations.
Mill has said that among her inspirations are Winsor McCay, the American cartoonist who created the Little Nemo strip; Katsuhiro Otomo, the Japanese manga artist; and Edmund Dulac, the French-born artist best known for his illustrations of the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. And it’s true that you do feel their influence on every beautiful, teeming, phantasmagorical page. However, she’s her own artist, too. It would be worth buying Square Eyes for her monochrome depictions of brutalist architecture alone, images in which she manages to make huge expanses of concrete seem both solidly cliff-like and unfathomably ghostly. So much sheer, bloody work has gone into this book, and in our instant culture, an environment it also happens to excoriate, it fairly takes the breath away.
• Square Eyes by Anna Mill and Luke Jones is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To order a copy for £16.33 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
