Review: SECOND SHIFT — A Beautiful Science Fiction Enigma

Since the dawn of science fiction, the concept of isolation has been a central theme. Whether it is a lone traveller on the verge of discovering new worlds, or the creation of something new thrust into a world it doesn’t understand and left to its own devices to discover who they are, these stories persevere. The outcast status of the central character allows creators to examine complex emotional feelings and philosophical concepts through a focal point that connects directly with the audience. This can be seen in one of the first science fiction novels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and also in Avery Hill’s upcoming new graphic novel Second Shift, written and illustrated by Kit Anderson.

The pitch is straightforward enough: volunteers work for the company and spend their lives on distant terraforming outposts processing incoming asteroids referred to as the payload. The workers work their shifts in turns, spending their downtime in suspended isolation. But what if you find something that challenges the world around you, and makes you question the reality of your situation? This is exactly what happens to Birdie Doran in Second Shift when she discovers another processing centre nearby, devoid of life but full of mysteries.

Second Shift begins with the central character, Birdie Doran, being woken up by the station’s AI in a sequence that is a mix of a system reboot and flashes of memory. This moment is a juxtaposition of science and nature, with the text representing the background code of a computer system while the images show a slowly emerging natural world. Anderson then uses this awakening to introduce the reader to the character and setting, allowing both character and audience to acclimatise to the situation together. This technique is a tried and tested science fiction trope that allows creators to drop an audience into any fantastic world and control the culture shock that is inevitable. You just need to see the introduction of the Nostromo crew in Ridley Scott’s Alien, or Jinn and Phyllis’ holiday cruise in Pierre Boulle’s novella La Planète des singes, to see how effective this kind of introduction can be. In Second Shift, Kit Anderson effortlessly introduces Birdie Doran, the station where she lives and works, and the few other characters that she interacts with, most notably the constantly form-shifting AI interface referred to simply as Station.

This opening sequence establishes Birdie’s relationship with the setting, and Anderson delays giving the reader a good look at the character until the scene has been set. Her artwork is very deliberate with sturdy lines that create shapes for the colouring to define. There is an ironic distinction between the machines that Birdie interacts with and the natural elements that fill the background of many panels. The manufactured elements are comprised of clean cut straight lines, coloured white or grey. The human elements, such as clothing, is more brightly coloured, and the natural world is less defined, with lines indicating the boundaries of the plants. But the colour does most of the heavy work, shaping the landscape that fits around Birdie and the machines. Complicating this neat separation of the manufactured and the natural is the AI interface. On the one hand, it’s clearly artificial, as signified by its ghostly colouring and ability to switch form at will, but the forms it takes are of creatures you might expect to find in the natural world depicted in the opening pages. This mix of natural and artificial acts as a link between the characters and their environment, a link which becomes more and more important to the narrative as the comic unfolds and Birdie’s world is turned upside down.

For a story so deeply tied to the control and reliance of Artificial Intelligence, the opening is surprisingly emotional, as it focuses heavily on the relationship between Birdie and Heck. An ongoing conversation between the two characters stretches over several pages, highlighting the difference of opinion between the two and their connection to Station. Anderson focuses the reader’s attention beautifully on this conversation, gently emphasising elements of the speech by subtly changing the background colour. Throughout much of this sequence, the unreality of the comics form is manipulated to enhance the speech and character acting. Heck’s posture speaks volumes, while Birdie’s gestures and quirky smiles enable Anderson to show how Heck’s words begin to get beneath Birdie’s skin. The backgrounds disappear, leaving panels empty of props and distractions, allowing narrative focus and character development to take place.

Second Shift isn’t your high octane, violent, action science fiction of 2000AD, but is a subversive emotional study about the effects of isolation and paranoia. The close relationship between Birdie and Station has a lot in common with the character work in comics such as Alex+Ada, except where Jonathan Luna and Sarah Vaughn’s comic from 2013 focuses on the emergence of humanity within a machine, Anderson’s work examines the effects that constant AI support has on the human spirit. It is a story about rediscovering humanity after the negative effects of technology. One of this book’s strengths is using the format of comics to highlight the contrasting worlds of technology and nature. The sterile, almost empty panels early in the book become the scene of some reality bending sequencing that calls back to outlandish science fiction sequences from such groundbreaking movies as 2001: A Space Odyssey. The cold and clinical is replaced by the mind bending and emotional.

This is a comic about contrasts, which suits the medium perfectly. There is the surface level “nature versus machine” concept, and just below that is the “emotional” compared to the “detached.” But the more you dig, the more you discover. There is science fiction jostling with fantasy, realism against surrealism, and even the artwork is constantly battling between reductive and highly detailed. Virtually empty panels on one page are followed by complex landscapes on the next. All of these choices feed back into the narrative, and make the reader question what they are seeing with their own eyes, and you become more attuned to the importance of the characters’ speech. Comics are a visual medium, and this is demonstrated perfectly by this story. Without the visual guides highlighting the duality of the narrative elements, the overall story would lose some of its power. Also this story would suffer as cinema because the reality of that medium would defuse the ambiguity of images throughout this book.

Second Shift is a seductive, albeit melancholic, graphic novel, that draws you in through the visuals before gripping your emotions and twisting them. Kit Anderson toys with the characters and readers alike, misleading both with the cutesy AI interface and the contradiction of image and text. Anderson plays with the visuals and occasionally changes the format of the page so a particular panel will lack its borders, forcing the image to bleed into the gutters, giving it a significance on the page. As engaging as the narrative is, its true beauty lies within the clever visuals and the underlining stories and ideas that these juxtaposed ideas create.

Avery Hill are currently running a kickstarter for Second Shift which can be found here!
This contains a gorgeous little animated video promoting the work, along with a number of backing options that include PDFs, physical books, and prints.

Second Shift is due for general release on May 7th, 2025.