Comic review: Alex + Ada #14- Run from the ballot box

Story By: Jonathan Luna & Sarah Vaughn
Art By: Jonathan Luna
Cover By: Jonathan Luna
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 29th April 2015



In the New World Order of the very near future your choices will be limited to comply or die. Driving your own car, paying for goods with cash and growing your own food will seem like subversive acts. Your life will be about living in a bubble of compliance to the will of the corporate state. If you resist you will be an enemy of that state, arrested, imprisoned, or murdered by uniformed order followers, and denounced as a terrorist on the corporate media.

Alex + Ada #14 is a very unhappy comic book, but it has to be. The future portrayed in the book is the future that we are currently building, so any other portrayal would be unrealistic, disingenuous and dishonest to the readers.

At the moment we are sleepwalking into total state control. Neo-liberalism, corporatism, illiberal democracy, fascism, new world order, globalism, call it whatever you like. Names are no longer important as our very language becomes warped, twisted, turned inside out to suit those who would enslave us with a friendly smile, a soft feminised voice, but a bullet in our head if we dare to resist their softly sold tyranny.

Here’s a warning. Voting for change will not bring about any change because the voting process is compromised.

So how to bring about real change if it’s impossible through the ballot box? It’s very easy actually. You take the lessons from Alex + Ada #14 and apply them to your own life.

Do things on a local, personal, face to face level.

Build your relationships from a bottom up, not top down perspective.

Use cash, not electronic money.

Grow your own food.

Put down your islavery device.

Live a simple life.

Don’t vote for your own slavery.

That last piece of advice is from me, obviously. The last barrier to change is the idea that democracy is still an avenue for change, and that is not addressed in the book. The other points however are addressed, and in this vital instalment of Alex + Ada you are given a truthful representation of what happens when you resist the state.

I won’t spoil it, but the protests happening in Baltimore US right now are highly significant and illustrative of the problem addressed in this book. What happens to people when they want to be left alone and an uniformed order follower is barking instructions at them that they ignore? Do they have a chat and sort out the problem, or does the state-sanctioned god do what he is allowed to do?

Alex + Ada #14 is about two people who want out of the New World order soft slavery system. They commit no crime other than a failure to comply. There is no victim, no harm has been done, and they just want to be left alone. That human desire to be left alone is incompatible with the top down corporate control system. Because Alex + Ada want to be left alone they have become the enemy of the state and will be dealt with as all enemies of the state are dealt with.

Buy this comic book, not because it has taken it’s time to tell a fascinating and emotionally engaging story and not because it has a refreshing lack of social justice warrior campaigning and the ability to step out of the politically correct clichés of it’s day. Buy it because it’s a comic book that shows you what will always happen when you vote for a centralised control system. Buy it and remember what you are voting for when you go the ballot box (on May 7th in the UK) and put a dead little cross in the box of your propagandised choice.


Rating: 9/10 (Dramatic and climatic)