Recently, James Tynion IV announced Cognetic, a new three issue limited series to be published by BOOM Studios. Described as the spiritual successor to last year’s breakout hit Memetic and the second in a trilogy of post-apocalyptic stories, Tynion describes Cognetic as a “psychic Die Hard.” The plot is kicked off by a being that takes control of the minds of everyone in the Empire State Building, coalescing their minds into one universal hive (which, not-so-coincidentally, parallels the ending of Memetic). The world has to fight to save its individuality or be subsumed into bland one-ness.
Tynion describes his work on Cognetic and Memetic as mediation on the fragility of control:
I just really think that’s frightening. There’s a sense of that in a lot of my work, the idea of what happens when you try to take too much control, when you try to control every aspect of a situation in the way that you might want to, and the way that reality tries to take that aspect of control away from you.
So the comfort of having total control over everything is a deep, comforting feeling. But it’s also something that is deeply dangerous, and it’s dangerous to the people who actually try to wield that power, and it’s very dangerous for the people that power is wielded over. Like, what happens when you just become a pawn, or just a little bacteria in the stomach of this larger being? It’s a concept that really unsettles me, and I want to poke at it, and make other people unsettled by it.
So if Memetic is about the body and Cognetic is about the mind, perhaps the last of the trilogy will focus on a crisis of the soul.
