You wouldn’t steal a car. You wouldn’t download a movie. You wouldn’t torrent a person…

Wait, what? Except that last situation is exactly what happens to protagonist Natalie Winters in new ComiXology Originals series .Self – pronounced Dot Self.

.Self is a five-part sci-fi thriller from Eisner-nominated writer Christopher Sebela (Crowded; High Crimes), artist Cara McGee (Black Canary: Ignite; Star Wars), colorist Rebecca Nalty (Finger Guns), and letterer Aditya Bidikar (These Savage Shores, Afterlift).

Bringing to mind the Black Mirror Season 2 episode Be Right Back, with Hayley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson, as well as Altered Carbon and Orphan Black, .Self centres on Natalie, a decidedly ordinary, “go with the flow” store manager leading a comfortable life with her doctor husband. Following her technophile hubby’s lead, Natalie even has a Postscript account, intended to let people “write [their] on ending.”

Essentially, Postscript, via ingested nanites, records and backs up your memories, feelings, and physical reactions to company servers. It also scans your hard drives, and analyzes your social media, with the result being a complete record of who you are. After death, all those files are uploaded to an artificial body called a Blank for 48 hours of face-to-face closure with loved ones.

It’s the ultimate safety net. Until it becomes the ultimate nightmare. Natalie’s Postscript account gets hacked, her backup files are torrented online and people begin making bootleg copies of her. While these dozen or so Blanks may not be exact physical replicas, they have all Natalie’s memories (including account passwords and bank pins), and her abandoned dreams. Then there are all her long-suppressed chaotic urges, now being enacted without fear of repercussion.

With her privacy blown wide open, and her identity hijacked, Natalie must stop her replicas. She’ll also have to save herself, as one by one the Blanks are assassinated.   

As a five-issue series, it will be interesting to see how many answers .Self provides to its tantalising questions. Before jumping into deeper philosophical, ethical, and socio-political issues – like “Are Blanks considered human; do they have any rights?” – there are simple narrative mysteries to untangle. Why Natalie? Who hacked her account? Who made and unleashed her Blanks into the world? Is Postscript behind the brutal cover up?” 

Issue one of .Self doesn’t even begin to tackle these topics. Rather, it spends its pages setting up Natalie’s bewildering situation, and developing her character. Here is a thirty-something woman who grew up poor, and has always prioritised self-sufficiency as a result. But in achieving her goal of a stable, worry-free life, she has found that contentment really isn’t the same as fulfilment, or happiness. And this is all before she starts meeting other versions of herself who are pursuing different paths in life.

With such a personal focus, and writer Sebela’s insistence that .Self isn’t a hard sci-fi tale (see also here), it seems unlikely we’ll get a deep dive into the science of Postscript’s consumer offer and its grand repercussions for the world. What we can expect instead is accessible, individual-centred and human-driven sci-fi, more like Y: The Last Man.

Also breaking from genre expectations is .Self’s art style. In combination with the book’s near future setting – which could honestly pass for 2021 at a glance – Cara McGee’s slice-of-life leaning line work, and Rebecca Nalty’s bright colour palette, make the comic feel more relatable and warm. This isn’t an austere, sleek future where the entire world has embraced the iStore aesthetic. Or a dark dystopian Blade Runner setting, where life is mostly grim, miserable and exploitative.

It’ll be interesting to see where .Self goes from here. Issue 1 is kinetic, credible and engrossing, with a nifty narrative choice to have Natalie tell her story by using the Postscript app to revisit (with inexperienced user clumsiness) her memories. The first issue also includes a mock-up of a Postscript User’s Manual, which is a great way to explore the technology in greater depth without grinding the story to a halt.

The first issue of digital exclusive .Self is already available, having released on November 2. You can purchase a copy here. Alternatively, if you’re a member of Amazon Prime, Kindle Unlimited, or comiXology Unlimited, you can read it now at no additional cost.