To put it succinctly: I couldn’t recommend Mindset highly enough. Already my favorite indie series of the year, Mindset #4 wonderfully utilizes everything that made the first three issues fantastic.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Mindset #4!
Mindset’s greatest strength has to be the near-perfect marriage of John J. Pearson’s art to Zack Kaplan’s story and themes. (By the way, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s lettering also continues to be excellent.)
Mindset’s premise – four guys developing an app that can literally control minds – requires a realistic setting in order to have any kind of impact. A sci-fi world too futuristic or weird wouldn’t allow us to reflect on our own cell phone use. We need to immerse ourselves in the tension of the story and wonder if our apps might be influencing us too much as well. To this effect, Kaplan constructs a very realistic and well-grounded story.
But Pearson, with assists from Jimmy Savage, illustrates this world and its characters in an almost surrealistic style. Surprisingly, this works perfectly. Somehow, this blatant lack of realism focuses our attention on the real-life importance of the existential themes being explored. The multiple layers of visual symbolism bring out the deeper and more abstract feelings and ideas that lie within the narrative. Additionally, the juxtaposition of real world themes and surrealistic art heightens the tension.
It’s also just a cool comic to look at. So, let me briefly spotlight some of the best images from Mindset #4 and how they work perfectly in the narrative.
I actually want to start with the variant cover by Conor Boyle. Boyle symbolizes one of the main themes of Mindset in the sequence of a person pulling out their cell phone, getting frustrated with it and attempting to throw it down, only for it to grow larger and replace the person’s head. Although we try to free ourselves of the negative influence our apps have over us, we can’t get rid of it. Instead, it takes over our minds.
Next, as he did in Mindset #2, in one scene Pearson illustrates Atlanta Hanna more fleshed out and colored, while Ben Sharp is flat and uncolored. They appear so as they talk to each other in the same panel. This depiction could symbolize many different things – who has more control at the moment or the mental/emotional state of each character. It makes for a striking contrast.
On the next page, we see a great image of Ben and Atlanta’s silhouette against a chain-link fence, with the image of private jets behind the fence drawn within the outlines of their silhouette. The scene is rich in themes of freeing oneself from outside control, wealthy enough to make one’s own choices and also being able to just fly away. All the while, Ben and Atlanta are quite obviously caged in by the chain-link fence.
The next double-page spread summarizes the astronomical rise and success of Ben’s Mindset app and associated company. But, the spread is dominated by the huge and eerie image of Ben, once again uncolored and flat, cut into strips as if put through a shredder and clumsily pasted back together. It’s an image that I can’t get out of my head, full of deep emotion and disassociation.
And then there is a scene in which a character has blood on his hands. The blood isn’t there in reality, just symbolically. But, we get the point.
Thematically, Mindset #4 brings back the deep questions of free will and control as they apply to cell phone and internet use that first came up in issue #1.
Once again, Ben talks about creating an app to free its users from the negative influence of big tech algorithms. But now that Ben is the CEO of the most popular app around, it sounds more like manipulative PR than altruistic dreaming. If the Mindset app, which uses actual mind-control, decides what you should and should not listen to, then isn’t the Mindset app controlling you instead of freeing you?
And what gives the creators of the Mindset app the right to decide which influences – political, religious, cultural – are toxic and which are positive?
There is a lot of truth and wisdom about internet usage that we often don’t realize or think about. For example, Kaplan explicitly describes the looping mechanism of choosing what you want to see and hear in the internet. Then the algorithms know to only show you what you already believe to be true. In Mindset #4, Ben is at the point of cynicism; the loop won’t ever be broken, so it doesn’t really matter.
I suppose the story ends up exactly where we should’ve expected when the premise was first introduced. But, it’s been so well executed that it still leaves me wondering where things may go and what revelations will come next.
Mindset #4 leaves us with a compelling mystery centered on the question Ben asks multiple times in the narration: “Who’s controlling who?” At the end of this issue, I’m not sure who to trust, who’s manipulating who to what purpose and who might be in on it all.
Most intriguing, I’m especially not sure which characters and plot decisions have been directly influenced by the mind-control app. Oh, I’m certain the creative team has dropped plenty of clues, mostly in the visual representation of the mind-control signal appearing in the background or between panels in certain scenes. This aspect of the story rewards a diligent re-read of the series. It also makes for a great cliff-hanger.
Mindset would’ve been on the list of best series of the year on the strength of its art and premise alone. The theme of cell phone and internet influence over our free will is incredibly important to our modern-day life. But, coupled with the thrilling story of big tech mystery and the multilayered exploration of existential themes, I would argue that Mindset is the very best comic series of the year. Each issue has left me thinking for days about free will and my cell phone use, all the while wondering what will happen next. In other words, I can’t wait for issue #5 to come out next month.
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