System preferences
Author: Hugo Bienvenu
Translator: Edward Gauvin
Publisher: Titan Comics
Publication date: September 2025
What if, in a digital future, the cloud is finite and the internet is nearly full? What if a world focused on short-term commercial gain and algorithmically defined profits decides what to keep? New, ultra-high quality social media content needs to be stored, so something has to be erased from existence to make room. In the future, no one will look at it anymore. WH Auden’s farewell poem or the work of Stanley Kubrick. It’s a terrifying prospect, brilliantly explored in Ugo Bienvenu’s graphic novel System Preference, now available in English thanks to translator Edward Gauvin and Titan Comic.
Eve Mutton works in an overflowing data center. His job is to identify objects that are too forgotten to be overlooked and present them to his superiors for erasure from existence completely. In Eve’s world, it’s illegal to copy or back up things that should be deleted, but he still does it secretly. What follows is a series of endings involving Eve, his wife, their unborn child, and a pregnant robonanny who becomes the receptacle for the stolen data.
Nearly every beautifully rendered page contains dialogue that reveals the superficial nature of future art and culture. While some of the dialogue can feel like the author is giving a soapbox speech, the story and ideas are consistently engaging. We are being shown a future where we no longer care about history, the past, the classics, or anything other than the brand new. A place where everyone is interacting but not culturally engaged. There’s also a funny office joke that reminds you of this concept. For example, two android company investigators are named after Tintin’s clumsy detective twins, but no one remembers the exact origins of their designations.
The art in System Preferences is solid, depicting the future in bright, flashy colors. Geometric design reminiscent of sci-fi media from the 60s and 70s. Although the colors give the impression of a bright future, it steadily becomes clear that the all-too-realistic dystopia is a rather depressing reality. Although the comic is a localization of the French bande dessinée, which contains more than 10 panels per page, Bienvenue sticks to a rather restrained, more familiar six-panel grid pacing, making the subject matter easier to understand. Also, whenever a full page or splash page occurs, it somehow takes my breath away every time.
This book is not without some flaws. The action sequences can feel out of place at times. There are points where the dialogue feels like a political diatribe, and at times it feels a bit dismissive of certain progressive trends in modern media. And the characterization in many ways feels quite uneven. Nevertheless, this is the kind of comic that deserves to be picked up by anyone looking for some thought-provoking science fiction.
System Settings is a masterful fable that entertains, intrigues, frustrates, and leaves you pensive once you finish the last page. It fundamentally questions what we choose to remember as a society and how we tell our stories, but it covers a lot more than that.
System Preferences now available
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