Finding Humanity In The Mechanical in Alex Paknadel and John Lê’s “GIGĀ” #1
“We could have made them look like anything, but we made them look like us.”
This quote is central to the thesis of counter/WEIGHT, the second season of Friends At The Table, an actual play podcast wherein the host, Austin Walker, and the cast play through a variety of independent and small press tabletop roleplaying games, translating their tabletop hijinks into a structured, if spontaneous and collaborative, narrative. counter/WEIGHT chronicles the conflict between two variations of Mecha: the Riggers, industrial yet humanoid mechanised exosuits that protect their human pilots from physical harm in larger mechanical warfare, and the Divines, somewhat conscious mechanised beings that have evolved beyond their human creators to literalise concepts such as Grace, Order and economical Rigour.
It’s a quote that’s played through my mind ever since listening to the show. We could have made them look like anything, but we made them look like us.
Humanoid robotics have been a part of storytelling since the dawn of science fiction; the often ill-concieved efforts to wrangle new life in our own image just as God supposedly crafted ours in His. It has its roots in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus and has inspired everything from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to George Lucas’s Star Wars to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and beyond. Indeed, even the term android has etymological roots in the Greek word anēr or andr-, meaning man.
Literally, bearing resemblance to the image of man.
Mecha, meanwhile, is a genre in itself that takes such a concept and expands it in scale. It has its roots in Japanese manga and generally refers to stories where massive humanoid robots house human pilots during warfare. Allowing modern warfare to be fought by extension and proxy, through the use of such mechanised armour. In Mecha, the existence of these giant robots can mean different things to each individual story.
In Yoshiyuki Tomino’s Mobile Suit Gundam, the eponymous Mobile Suits are a new class of warfare: detached, proxy battles where the taking of a human life is hidden beneath the veneer of the easy destruction of robotic facsimiles. In Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion, the Eva Series mechs and their shields of Absolute Terror Fields protect their teenage pilots from physical and emotional harm in its womb-like core, literalising the way we often shield our own hearts from harm after trauma, simultaneously preventing further harm as well as preventing true, human connection.
As the Mecha genre has proliferated in the West with the Wachowski’s The Matrix trilogy and Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim and others bringing giant robots to modern Hollywood filmmaking, the existence of these mechs takes on new meaning in each telling.
In “GIGĀ” #1, written by Alex Paknadel and illustrated by John Lê with colours by Rosh and lettering by Aditya Bidika, the eponymous Gigā are the manifestation of the Gods. Or, as the issue itself phrases it:
The Gods built the Gigā to fight their battles for them, right?
These beings were not made by the hand of man, as far as we know, but of something beyond. Fighting their ancient war on Earth and falling into a slumber, leaving humanity to adjust in their wake. And so, humanity became their keepers. As our protagonist, Evan puts it, humanity is the commonwealth of microbial helpers which keep the Gigā, for lack of a better term, alive.
The world of “GIGĀ” is one that has been irrevocably changed by the arrival and existence of these machine beings. All of human society, seemingly, has morphed in response to them. Religions have been built of them, as have anti-theist organisations. The poor root around their insides for scrap that they can trade for rations. It is a world whose primary predication is being in service to this manifestation of the will of the Gods.
This shift from our world is showcased in John Lê’s art. Littered throughout this first issue are landscapes of jungles and mountains and cityscapes that are dotted with these slumbering giants and it feels… right. There’s something about the way cities have been built around the Gigā, the way apartment complexes are crafted from their legs, the way trees and moss grow around the hands and feet of a colossal, mechanised being as it lays in slumber on the side of a mountain. It is itself a mountain.
We have grown used to human industrialisation changing the face of the world. Forests shrink and skyscrapers grow. Manmade islands create new and unique topography in the sea. We have imposed our will upon our world, so why can’t these giants, the will of the Gods, do the same? Just as husbandry has lead to us bringing domesticated animals into our service, so too have the Gigā brought ours into theirs. The cycle of life continues, but we are no longer at the top of the hierarchy.
Lê and colourist Rosh take us from the warm, yet imposing industrial innards of a Gigā in the first page, the stark red and white of the clergyman striking against the muted blue of the novices, to the beauty of the natural world. Dense greenery and pouring rain. Yet here Evan lies beaten because of the tribalism that divides his world. Any beauty we could glean from nature has been taken from us, washed away in the mud and filth.
We venture once more inside a Gigā, but something is off. A smoking hole in the guts of this mechanical giant. Carrion birds strip flesh from human corpses. And a shift from muted greens and browns to deafening reds signal the murder at the core of this mystery. It’s perhaps the most striking page of the first issue and it’s certainly designed to be. Paknadel pulls back gradually over the course of the scene, going from two dialogue heavy pages to one with only five word balloons. And letterer Aditya Bidikar does a masterful job of shrinking the dialogue to a whisper, in awe of the carnage.
From the closeup of Evan’s eyes as he beholds the sight of the massacre to the low shot peeking over what bodies we see back at Evan and his friend, Myra, what is left unseen is not left unsaid.
Which is what I find so interesting about “GIGĀ” #1. At the core of Mecha, often literally, is humanity. People, almost always ordinary people thrust into an incredible world through their encounters with the robots themselves. A common theme is asking what happens to human society when these wonders of creation come into existence and it’s important to note that they are, more often than not, brought into existence by human hand. Paknadel and Lê masterfully flip the script, making the Gigā alien beyond human ken, but inextricable from our own existence.
The Gigā are unknowable. They have no agency, they have no active presence in the story. They are, by and large, set dressing. Yet why are they still so present in the story itself? I think a large part, again, comes down to John Lê. Every page of this first issue features the Gigā. Sometimes it’s overtly, a wide shot showing them dominating landscape, sometimes it’s almost unconscious.
Even Evan’s apartment is within the leg of a Gigā. They are an inescapable presence of this world.
So, what happens to human society in the wake of a war between these mechanical Gods, after they fall into their deep sleep and rest upon the Earth? Well, humans happen. Human society progresses in many of the same ways it has throughout our own history. Religious fanaticism leads to incurious and rigid hierarchies which leads to counter-culture curiosity and heresy which leads to anti-religious zealotry which is expounded upon by class inequality that leads to the common person’s life being relegated to slums, scavenging for food.
But that’s all surface level stuff, setting up the world. It is, after all, only the first issue. Many of these themes remain to be explored as the work goes on. What’s key to this first issue is Evan, the protagonist. Several things are made clear about Evan in this first issue: he’s an amputee, he’s curious to the point of heresy in the eyes of the world’s church, and he has a sympathetic heart. Perhaps too sympathetic.
The heart of this issue is Evan’s connection to Laurel, an android with artificial intelligence who Evan hides from the authorities and seeks to repair her deteriorating inner workings. It’s an interesting idea and one that certainly gripped me. Here is a boy who turned his back on a secure life within the clutches of the church to scavenge for parts in order to house and repair an illegal being.
Where the series will go from these initial ideas is only for Paknadel and Lê to know for sure, but what is laid out in this first issue shows they have a masterful grasp of the genre and a genuinely unique take on it.
