By J.D. Morvan (writer) and Huang-Jie Wei's (artist), Zaya is centered around the title character, a former agent for a covert, possibly criminal agency called Spiral. Zaya's pulled from retirement after six years to help capture some mysterious killer in a big puffy mechanical suit. The killer had plans of his own, things go sideways, Zaya and her sentient ship Lia have to make a quick departure through hyperspace.
Things go wrong during that, they drift into some bubble/spore/globule looking thing, and when they emerge, nothing is right. Nobody in Spiral recognizes Lia. Her twin daughters are now her sister's children. The mysterious killer is their father, even though his corpse is in Zaya's ship. That leads to a reversal of the situation, where Zaya's now the one being pursued by him, as well as the rest of Spiral and agents of the government.
Zaya ultimately gets to make a choice and I suppose makes the same one she's been making since she was a kid. It's become part of her nature to sacrifice for her sister, and she remains true to that. It gives the story a conclusion, but it didn't feel much like one when I was reading. Had a, "is that it?" reaction. I guess Zaya's abandoned any notion of pulling a Sam Beckett and making that leap home.
Which is fine, no neat happy ending. The contrary part of me balks at her agreeing to help people who hunted her down on "research" into the mess that sent her there. There just aren't enough stories where people get those offers and tell the person to fuck off. Probably because those stories would end there, with a bullet in the head.
But Morvan established Zaya worked for Spiral to provide for her sister. They took advantage of her desperation and turned her into a killer. Even when they let her retire, they were still able to pull her back in the moment they needed her, the implicit threat that they could harm her sister or children. And it feels as though these government guys are the same. They're going to use her and Lia as guinea pigs, or else Zaya's probably going to jail or being dissected.
Best of a bad set of options.
Huang-Jie likes to add a lot of detail to machinery, especially under the surface. Ciegrim's special suit looks like a trash bag with hoses and a mask attached, but underneath are cables and wires coiling and twisting as they run up and through the limbs. It's the same for Lia. Her exterior resembles a warship, maybe an upside-down battleship. Inside is a more varied, sculpted look (which is interesting since Zaya became a sculptor after retiring, but isn't the one who designed Lia). When Zaya reformats Lia's mind to free her from monitoring, the representation goes from a solid black tower to this squirming mass of tentacles or worms. It's an organic look, with a Ghost in the Shell influence to the art.
Or maybe that's just because Zaya looks a fair bit like Major Kusanagi. The people are more of a mixed bag. Huang-Jie's very good at drawing clothing and how it hangs on the body. Even the stuff that's closer to skintight still bunches or folds in places as it contours. But characters often have blank expressions, or ones that don't seem to match the dialogue. Although that's being translated, so maybe that's on the dialogue. There's also some unusual angles for some of the panels, extreme perspectives where the reader is seemingly looking straight up at someone or something, or just things look oddly proportioned from the angle. It's not bad or even necessarily distracting, just something I noticed.
I don't know if I actually like this or not. I went in expecting more focus to be on Zaya trying to hunt down and capture Siegim, so the fact that was ultimately incidental - really, not even something she was trying to do - threw me. And I'm not sure what Morvan was driving at here. In this other reality, Siegim has the life Zaya had. He was part of Spiral in her reality, but became angry and turned on them. Is that what happened to her here, or did she never exist at all? Is it what could have happened to her if she didn't get pregnant, wasn't able to get out temporarily? Or is all that not really important to the story?
On the other hand, it's a beautiful book. The amount of detail in the settings, the way Huang-Jie depicts fire, I'm not sure I'd ever seen it drawn as intertwining swirls of black and red. Clouds or smoke are fluffy, but shaded in a way that gives them more weight than most artists manage. So reading this had value from that perspective, certainly.
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