How many times have I mentioned my love of anthologies? It’s been at least a couple months, right? While comics as a medium are great for telling longer stories, shorter pieces are stitched into their DNA. Good anthologies come and go and the best stick around in your mind for years since there’s always that one story with an ending so strong you can’t help but tell everyone you know about it. And that’s why I’m not going to stop talking about Vanishing Point by Mark Russell, Ryan Alexander-Tanner, Juan Doe, Carlos M. Mangual, Sidney Davidson, Alberto Ponticelli, Ellie Wright, and Jok.

Vanishing Point is a lot of things. It’s a madness that comes from work that on the surface seems mundane, but becomes its own horror show the longer you do it. It’s the final gasp of life revealing itself through a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. It’s an endless zoo of experimentation in which an uncaring warden splices DNA into millions of creatures just to see what’ll happen. It’s a robot being confronted with its mortality and the limits of its own programming as it comes to terms with its incoming death. It’s a therapeutic cruelty that keeps people alive just long enough to be executed. It’s an armored figure coming from a too-close-for-comfort-future to destroy the present before it can destroy the future. For the most part, it’s everything good with anthology comics and short-form storytelling.

There are ending pages in Vanishing Point that I’m going to be thinking of for years. The set-ups lend themselves so well to these single-issue stories that going any further would bloat them beyond the impact they’re looking to make. Just the conceit of the fourth issue, “Proof of Life,” shows us that a story about a robot gaining sapience doesn’t have to become that robot struggling to stay alive. It can instead be a test from the other robots that have also gained sapience to see if this unit is ready for the truth about their existence: that they exist to finish building a Dyson sphere and need the imagination that comes with self-awareness to complete it. But there exists in the series hope and horror in equal measure. The fifth issue gives us radical therapy to convince someone to stop their suicidal ideation by putting them into a scenario where they’re faced with death. But it’s not to convince them to live. They just want to keep the person alive long enough to make a spectacle of their execution. 

Vanishing Point is everything I’d want to see in a science fiction anthology series. There are moments here that call to mind the best of The Twilight Zone or The Night Gallery while staying true to the roots of series like Strange Adventures and many E.C. Comics’ series. When I say that anthologies are sewn into the DNA of comics, it’s series like Vanishing Point that show us exactly where comics come from and where they’re going to go. 

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.