With the entire world facing a growing climate crisis, cartoonist Mathieu Bablet has a new graphic novel about what life on the other side of that crisis might look like. Magnetic and Oni Press are teaming up to bring Bablet’s graphic novel Silent Jenny to an English-language audience for the first time.
With the Kickstarter campaign for Silent Jenny live now, IGN can exclusively debut a new preview of the graphic novel. Check it out in the slideshow gallery below:
Silent Jenny is written and drawn by Bablet. The book caps off a thematic trilogy of sci-fi graphic novels that started with Shangri La and Carbon & Silicon. Here’s the official logline for Silent Jenny:
Silent Jenny explores a not-too-distant future, where climate change continues to ravage the planet, and the disappearance of insects has led to the end of pollination, rendering vast areas of land infertile. A survival dynamic has emerged—mobile cities called “monads” have formed, and people strive to help each other; each group with its own customs, traditions, and ways of life.Jenny is a rather solitary researcher trying to restore the world as it once was. She seeks to recover bee DNA to clone and re-create pollinating insects. However, she will come to realize that this is impossible—the old world no longer exists, and a new one must be built. She will have to make peace with the notion that all things come to an end, no matter how much you may fight the inevitable…
“I’m thrilled that after Shangri-La and Carbon & Silicon, the American public will finally discover the end of my science fiction trilogy!” said Bablet in a statement. “I hope you enjoy this plunge into the underworld, exploring the wastelands, and traveling aboard the monads!”
“Silent Jenny asks, ‘What remains of our humanity when our tools are gone?’ Through a blend of desert punk aesthetics and dystopic nightmare, the story is about environmental reclamation and the search for meaning in a world that has moved on from us,” said Magnetic Press’ Director of Publishing, Mike Kennedy. “The book explores how we communicate through action, gesture, and presence — and how meaning survives even when language fails. Like Mathieu’s previous books Shangri-La and Carbon & Silicon, this book packs a powerful punch that really makes you think about where we, as a species, might be heading. If you loved the atmospheric mystery of The Arrival, the haunting wastelands of Nausicaä, or the architectural grandeur of Moebius, Silent Jenny belongs on your shelf.”
The crowdfunding campaign for Silent Jenny is live now.
In other comic book news, Marvel is revisiting a controversial era in The Spectacular Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and the upcoming Avengers: Armageddon #1 will include an exclusive Magic: The Gathering card.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.
