City: The Mind in the Machine #1 is an interesting beginning to what promises to be a fun series. Set in the near future, it depicts a security-obsessed San Francisco, under the constant watch of 40,000 cameras. It’s implied that this is practically Big Brother-level surveillance, and that it makes catching and prosecuting criminals a piece of cake—though, honestly, there are about 10 times that many CCTV cameras in present-day London.
Rather than simply using these cameras as a deterrent, however, one company tries to find a way to use those cameras to stop crimes in progress. Programmer Ben develops Golden Shield, a program that’s able to monitor all of those cameras at once and detect criminal activity in progress—at least in theory. In practice, the demonstration of this new software goes spectacularly (and hilariously) wrong, and Ben is forced to rewrite it—evidently all by himself—to try to fix things. Then, suddenly, one day, a new possibility for making Golden Shield a reality presents itself in an unexpected way.
Parts of the story are a little clichéd; there’s a girl in the office that Ben has a crush on but is too nervous and awkward to respond to her obvious signals. Ben also has a suave, ladies’ man of a best friend who wants to teach Ben how to live by hitting the clubs. These are minor things, though. The story as a whole is compelling so far, and it will be interesting to see where it goes from here. The art is also good, and they do a good job of creating the world of the story and immersing us in it. There’s a lot of potential here, and I, for one, look forward to the next issue.
