by xarielx » October 27th, 2014, 1:11 am
Hello Uzo and Tabico, personally "Guided Tour" is a cyber sci-fi knockout of visual effects and advanced comic book storytelling. It is almost an overload to read your comics in a marathon, but while "Aria of the Hive" filled my curiosity, "Guided Tour" was in many ways a predictable, yet unpredictable read. What I mean is, on its face, taken alone, it is a one-shot tale of a woman who finds the idea of joining a collective of sex robots unbearably arousing, and her spiral down into enslavement. It is in many ways a classic fetish story in its best form. However, I went into this after "Aria of the Hive", and the subversion, the seduction, the slow circling of one coercive act to the next, which is present in both, hinted at the massive single drive that commands these machines to do what they do.
Niobe's statement: "Converting everyone is not required to achieve our goals.", was, in many ways, the culmination of the Hive's objectives. The drones, the controllers, the slaves, the sleepers, all point to the Hive doing what a secretive shadow organization would do, which is control the masses without the knowledge they are under control. The comic in itself is pure white heat in terms of fetishism. You have hypnosis, scantily clad or nude slaves mindlessly walking throughout, some of Uzo's best transformation work, as well as a protagonist who herself has been REPROGRAMMED to be a fetishist! That there was a twist was obvious, this is a Tabico story after all, and all good stories offer a twist, but that the twist would be the focal point as to why Erin had decided to take this tour was in itself a showcase of the antagonist, the Hive, through Niobe were master schemers in the best sense of the term. Erin's droning of her student was easily the highlight, which pushed this reader's buttons to the extreme. That Erin herself ended up the same as Niobe, even more so, as evidenced by the Hive machinery she is "plugged" into, was a delightful finish to an amazing addendum to the Division universe.
Thank you both for delivering such a staggering work to us!