Low. Vol. 1: The Delirium of Hope

Millennia in the future, with the sun expanding and dying, the last humans reside at the bottom of the ocean. With their life-sustaining technology finally failing, their leaders have given in to drugs, debauchery, and despair. Then, Stel Caine receives a message from a returning, malfunctioning space probe that has discovered another inhabitable world—but to retrieve that planet's location, someone must ascend to the Earth's uninhabitable surface and find the probe. So Stel lifts herself out of a decade-long grief caused by the splintering of her family and begins a quest that everyone else considers hopeless. Stel believes in the "law of attraction"—that reality is directly shaped by human consciousness—giving the story an unusual inspirational (though not overtly religious) philosophical underpinning. Tocchini's art is sketchlike and occasionally awkward, but his coloring is wonderful; appropriately muted in tone while at the same time lush and expressionistic, whether depicting amazing technological and natural undersea vistas or highly charged scenes of drama and violence.