Written by Chris Rowley
Drawings by Justin Norman
Printed by Red Sky and NBM
There was a point in time, say 2002, when NBM put out a short four part series called the 3rd Degree, a futuristic sexy thriller that is well worth finding and reading. There are just four parts to this story line where the internet pervades your entire life, and you cannot do anything about it, nor can you keep from being monitored. The story line takes place in 2020. A system called the Cube is the ultimate in personalization, it will grow and expand as you grow and expand with new things, interests, and ideas. The problem is that it also knows everything about you to complete the process of personalization. However, one intrepid CEO has bigger ideas, and a way to make sure that the ultimate in life personalization can help humankind rather than become a nightmarish 1984 type scenario. Yet when the brainwashing and memory wiping begins, the CEO and others find out just how dangerous personalization can be, and what happens when an ultimate machine controls all the software we interact with, and how we lives our lives.
Part singularity, part fear pandering against then what was just the start of personalization (I wonder how the writers would feel about Facebook, my6thSense, and other personalization systems), part advice against what the internet could do to us, backed with explosions, guns, and a certain amount of mayhem. This is a awesomely crafted comic book for its time, partly seeing into the future, when we play our lives on screen and on the internet with little or no understanding how that information can be and will be used against us. Written back in the day, this comic book still has some lessons we could pay attention to in our connected and shared lives. Of course, there are things we do not share, or wish that people could not dig up on us, and then there we are, we are the persona we create online right now. What would happen if everything we did, including everything we did and do shows up on line. Would we hold up our sociopathic management to the light of the world hoping for sympathy? What if we really learned that that we are all creatures of our misery, but then we get some awesome guns, bombs, and abilities to kick butt across the internet.
Realistically this series called some of the internet and some of the things we do right from almost 10 years ago. The thing they did not think of is that we would share our lives on line willingly with companies like Google, Facebook, and other corporate systems that have immense access to our personal information. This is an awesome series that is well worth reading when you can find it, and you will want all four parts to this series for it to make sense. Girls, guns, bombs, the internet, what more could you ask for with this classic science fiction internet cyberpunk style comic book.
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