GIGS
Writer: Mark Mosedale
Artist: Si Smith
Publisher: Top Shelf – IDW Publishing
Publication Date: June 2026
At the center of all our lives is a black box. A tiny rectangle that sucks away all our time, all our attention and dictates the way we navigate the world. The design is clean, sharp, even appealing. Its simple elegance draws us in until we become trapped, replacing our rhythms with whatever pace the device dictates.
Gigs – by Mark Mosedale and Si Smith – opens with the allure of that rectangular void. At the center of the page, the block box appears and stains the perfect white background. On the corner of the screen, the smallest suggestion then appears. “Blip.” So tiny, so unassuming, so benign. It disappears as you turn the page, maybe you just imagined it. Then once again, that black box poisons the center of your view and once again that “blip” appears, until slowly the small rectangle grows into a full page, and the full page transforms into a series of claustrophobic, neatly ordered rectangles that control your view.
In this world dominated by screens we meet Sara and Ivy, sisters who live together and work “gigs” that come in through their phones. Much like today, the sci-fi future of Gigs revolves around a tech takeover of the social order, allowing the rich and well off to continue being rich and well off, devoid of the problems of the working class. Those of us who aren’t so lucky (or who refuse to sell out into this system) are forced to live off “basic,” a form of universal basic income that requires its recipients to work gigs assigned to them on their phones at all hours of the day. It’s the natural extension of today’s world where workers have no power, no autonomy and no proper training to work within their own specialized skill sets. Instead, everyone is forced into the same box of work-for-hire contract labor whose only benefit is that, if you’re lucky, you don’t starve.
Gigs presents a bleak world, but it’s not far off from what things feel like today. Ivy’s precarious existence is how many people who work on delivery or ride share apps feel, promised the illusion of total independence only to be controlled by the algorithmic forces of the app that allows them to live. Actually, “live” might be too strong a word. It’s more like “subsist” because both today’s gig workers and the future of Gigs is defined by people’s inability to live meaningful lives when systems of control are designed to give you just enough to subsist and consume, never more than that.
In this introductory stretch, Mosedale and Smith depend heavily on 9-panel grids to give the story a sense of weary monotony. The world the reader sees gives no weight to unique personalities or exciting changes of pace. Rather, everything is controlled, neatly boxed into uniform panels that rob the characters and world of any defining feature other than control. It’s an effective technique, and it leads to a frustrating sense of routine that everyone is powerless to break free from. There’s a particularly great moment where Ivy meets a mobile librarian who picks up and delivers books across the world. Their conversation extends across 2 pages of 9-panel grids but at the very end there’s a slight change in the lettering. Ivy starts to show interest, excitement. Through filling in for her sister at a retirement home, she’s met a wonderful older woman named Syd that teaches her the history of punk music. She wants to express that new found dimension of herself and her dialogue actually breaks out of the panel into the gutters as she tries to communicate this.
Only for her speech to be cut off. The pair return to their own panels and their emotions are returned to the confines of the prison-like bars of the grid. This small 3 panel sequence shows just how much the world has beaten these two down. Even when you’re doing the right things, like spreading the love of music and literature, it’s hard to live within the spirit of those works when the world forces you into routines and structures you didn’t choose for yourself.
From here, Ivy’s story is told in connection with Syd’s as the two go down a journey of appreciating punk music for their social-political relevance while also recognizing the music’s and their inability to actually change the structure of their lives. Syd’s reminiscence of punk is justifiably romanticized, presenting Ivy with a fantasy world of disruptive concerts and hardlined political stances that often omit the limitations of both the music and the weaknesses of the musicians themselves. Ivy eventually challenges Syd on this, but by that point the music has done its job. Ivy recognizes what it means to be punk rock, whether or not anyone else lives up to those expectations.
From here, the book is divided into several sections of various lengths, moving away from the 9-panel grids to more thematically appropriate designs based on the stories being told. However, what unites all the characters we meet going forward is the challenge to become more than what the technology has turned them into. The work of smart phones and algorithmic distribution of gigs is not just a top-down system of domination, but also a mode of training. Every day, the phones we use and the expectations we have for our jobs are teaching us to engage with the world in only one way, and everyday our personal dimensions are flattened by these tech-based rules and structures. The journey of Gigs from this point is to help each of these characters realize the parts of themselves they’d lost, to re-train them to be human rather than just cogs in a grander machine.
These moments of humanity breaking through are not seismic shifts in the world of Gigs, but rather small and intimate personal lessons. As Ivy is told early on that the only way to exist in this world is to “do the next right thing.” And indeed, for most of our characters that’s what they need to remind themselves of in the midst of working in a world that doesn’t care whether you live or die. Each of us is trying to do the next right thing, and often that means small acts of rebellion in the face of technology’s expectations for us. We run further than we thought ourselves capable of, we use our time away from work to exist in resistance to what the workday made us into, and we take care of ourselves so that we have the strength to live and not just subsist.
Many books about the tech industry or the failures of capitalism spend a great deal of time laying out the problems before us and their natural consequences. But for one reason or another, all of them end on the same note: some abstract gesturing at a possible future of collective action that can begin to fix everything without any specifics that would be particularly useful. Almost as if an editor looked at the bleak reality of it all and said “we need to try and provide even just the tiniest illusion of hope!”
The end of Gigs has a similar quality, taking us into a possible counterforce to the tech world we’re dominated by. While I was deeply engaged with most of the story, I found the ending to have a tacked-on, forced optimism quality similar to most books about these issues. It’s a bit much to say the ending is unearned, but it certainly feels like the hope it offers is more hollow than the gripping weight of the world it presents you with. Sometimes the best way to give people the will to act is to preserve the darkness of the subject matter, to not offer hope so that the reader is forced to come to that on their own. I would have liked Gigs to take that approach so as not to diminish its own impact that it worked so hard to create up to that point.
The ending aside, I really enjoyed Gigs for its presentation of the not-so-distant future we’re heading towards. Mosedale and Smith’s use of 9-panel grids is often a great visual representation of how phones, apps and algorithms disrupt our lives with the illusion of order, and the subsequent stories that break with the grid are equally thematically dense. The incorporation of music and the history of the punk scene is also a great reminder that powerful art tends to exist in opposition to the status quo, but art alone doesn’t change the world. For that we need people who care about themselves and about what the world has denied them.
Gigs is out this month via Top Shelf!
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