It's All Relativity

Oh, he calls camp the flaming outskirts of hell now, but by the end of summer, he won't want to leave.

In Milos Slavkovic's Lightstep, everything revolves around relativity. At least the part that says the faster you go, the slower time goes, relative to someone moving at a lower speed. In-story, what that means is people higher up the social ladder live on worlds that move at higher speeds than the dregs. There's a two-page splash where a man born on a slum planet lives his entire life while only a day passes on the Bloodliners' world.

January Lee lives on the Bloodliners' world. She can't go through with some ritualistic reenactment of murders of inferiors, because it would mean really killing her brother, and is banished to a lower world. Not the lowest, because she gets abducted at one point and goes at least one level further down. It does provide an opportunity for January to get a serious skill upgrade in what seems like a single afternoon for the rest of the cast. I assume if the story leads to her trying to overthrow someone, it'll be years for January since her banishment, but only minutes for that person.

She winds up on the ship of a "radio pirate" named Samson, who is trying to find a lost princess. . . by finding the transmissions of an old Earth sci-fi radio program, which somehow unerringly predict all the important moments of his life, despite the programs having been broadcast two eons ago. By the end of the five issues in the trade, he's figured out someone's pulling his strings to get him where they want him to be.

Slavkovic is one of the writers (along with Mirko Topalski and Ivan Brankovic), as well as the artist and one of the two colorists. Slavkovic's art has a Renaissance feel to it in how people look. That fleshy, almost cherubic look, with all smooth edges and lines. Not just the people, most of the spaceships are curved, resembling a yacht of pleasure barge or something. The blade ship is an exception, but it's a ship designed to disable other ships by moving really fast and using that energy to cut things in half.