A Korean nine-year-old named Jesse is adopted and sent to live with a lovely couple in America. Socially awkward, yet equipped with a seemingly encyclopedic brain, the young girl's journey through the complexities of race, gender, and identity hits a fork in the road when she discovers she's not entirely human...yet.
Adolescence just got a lot more emotional for the world's first true A.I. system.
Collects MADE IN KOREA #1-6
February 14, 2022
A great unease permeates this visually striking graphic sci-fi fable from Holt (Skip to the End) and Schall (Better Angels), which takes place in a world where synthetic children are sold to childless couples. An engineer in Seoul makes a mathematical discovery and sells one “discounted” to a couple in Texas, with his new code secretly uploaded. When this “proxy,” Jesse, is powered on for the first time by her adoptive parents, her eyes suddenly snap open. Then her behavior seems to go off-kilter. Schall’s art adds to the disquiet with otherworldly character drawings. Jesse has the information-processing capabilities of a super computer but no social skills. Once enrolled in school, she falls in with an extremely bad crowd, with violent consequences. Instead of dealing with the repercussions of Jesse’s actions, the narrative finds her whisked back to South Korea. There, for the first time, she confronts her uncertainty about her assigned gender and faces off against the company that manufactured her. The plot leaps can pull readers out of the strange and mysterious world, and while themes around identity, gender, and personhood are introduced, many questions are left hanging. Despite the uneven execution, there’s much to chew on in a cool package for philosophical sci-fi fans.
Starred review from March 15, 2022
Bill and Suelynn Evans of Conroe, Texas, can't have kids. Their experience at their wealthy friends' son's birthday party inspires a search for a proxy of their own. In this not-too-distant reality, "the smartest men on the planet" are consumed with "makin' phony kids" instead of alleviating the seemingly ubiquitous infertility problem. Bill and Suelynn don't have $800,000 for a comparable model, but they find one "practically free" from Korea. Nine-year-old Jesse, as the couple names her, arrives to complete the Evans family. Jesse adapts quickly to her loving, devoted parents; she also demonstrates her prodigious literacy her first night at home. She reads a quarter of the local library in less than a week and announces that "what she craves more than books is socialization." After a perfect entrance-test score, Jesse is welcomed by Walden High School's director, but bored, destructive older teens aren't exactly the best company for an awkward but brilliant young child. Meanwhile, back in Seoul, rogue engineer Kim Dong Chul, Jesse's de facto inventor, gets fired and heads to the U.S., determined to raise his creation himself. Holt folds in their own background as a Korean-born, nonbinary, transracial adoptee, brilliantly melding identity issues with speculative AI enhancement. Brazilian, Barcelona-based Schall's art provides an ideal, exacting visualization of Holt's new world. Volume 2 can't come fast enough!
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