 Hey everybody, welcome to another exciting episode, another edition of A Week in Geekdom here on YouTube. And today we're talking Ultimate Sky Doll Collection from Alessandro Barbucci and Barbara Canepa. So stay tuned. Welcome back to the channel everybody and yeah, due to overwhelming demand, all of you guys wanted me to review the book. So here we are talking about Sky Doll. If you don't know what the story is about, well, let me tell you that basically it's a world, sort of this fictional parallel universe that is on this planet that is ruled by Papacy's. Before the start of the story, there's two main Papacy's. One is Agape, based on the Greek word and I probably butchered that pronunciation, and Ludovica. Agape is representing spiritual love while Ludovica is more about the carnal and sexual love. These two ideologies and philosophies sort of, they intertwine with each other but at the end of the day, there is a massive falling out and Ludovica, this power-hungry bad woman, takes control of the situation and gets rid of Agape and its followers who are now labeled as heretics. Now Ludovica is in present time ruling the galaxy if you will, using mass media and so called miracles to impress her fans and her followers, some of that stuff. I say I do the air quotes because these miracles are manufactured by a production team. So it's pretty interesting. The story aside from being a sci-fi romance, if you will, also goes into philosophy and the ideas of mass manipulation and how you commercialize religion, philosophy, sexuality, all that stuff. All those themes get explored in this story. Now the story itself is told, however, through the eyes of Noah, a skydall. That's how we get the name of the book. The skydall is basically this lifeless android who doesn't have any rights and they're usually, unfortunately, they're used for more carnal things if you catch my drift. Now Noah is working for this sort of mafioso alien dude that runs either a brothel slash car wash where all these skydalls are hooked up to cable and they clean cars and all that stuff. And typically these dolls don't have a lot of personality to them, unlike Noah who wants to see more and to experience life and sort of she's having these visions throughout the book and is hearing things and wants to find out more. After a series of peculiar events she meets up with two missionaries that are out on a task to travel to a different planet and do something that I don't want to spoil yet. This event will shape the course of the whole book, but at the beginning of the story Noah is through a series of events, like I mentioned, hooks up with these two missionaries and starts this adventure across the galaxy, meeting all sorts of people, aliens, creatures. It's a really vivid place and the world building that the creators are doing is pretty awesome. There are a lot of concepts thrown around, but it never boxed down to where you can't really get it or it's not too pander to audiences. It's the right amount of philosophical questioning where it doesn't get too up in its own head if you will. One of the best selling points for Skydol is definitely the artwork. It is a thing of beauty and one of my favorite comics of recent memory simply because of the art. It mixes a lot of things that I like. It reminds me of storyboard animation from a 70s and 80s, 2D, Disney and animation projects, stuff like that. But it also has very manga and anime sensibilities mixed in with the Euro comics and the art that you see over there. It's such a curious, cool mashup of art styles to produce something really unique. I love the character design for Noah. She looks fantastic and the coloring on this book really does an amazing job of just making it stand out from everything else that you're reading. The colors are so vibrant and beautiful and they're popping with personality that it's just a visual treat to read the book. You should know if you're going in for Skydol for the first time, the story's not done. There are 4 main books in this collection and the 5th story is not out yet or it's not done. It ends on a cliffhanger, but I do suspect that it's the end game portion at the end so maybe one more volume. There's not a whole lot of elements left to solve by the end of book 4 in this collection so yeah, maybe volume 5 or 6 will end the thing. Hopefully I'm raising some type of awareness so we can get that because after I finished reading the book I looked online and couldn't really find a status update on the series. So if anybody can throw a bone and help me out, is the story going to continue? Are they really going forward with the 5th book? I haven't read anything online about it but hopefully they do because it's a pretty interesting story. I like the concepts. I like the idea of examining or mixing philosophical terms with what would usually be a political struggle, a political story if you will. The character of Noah, she's finding more about herself and there might be something mysterious about her with special abilities and whatnot and that is a major driving force of the whole book as her character evolves and is experiencing things and interacting with people with the characters of Roy and Yahoo or Yahoo? I don't know. It sounded like Yahoo like the website so I thought that was pretty funny. The pacing and the overall structure of the story, it's a little bit all over the place. The transition between books can be a little bit odd at times as you move from the first chapter to the second, third and fourth. Especially between third and fourth, there's a pretty big time skip, could use a little bit more fleshing out now that I'm thinking about it, some more exposition. I do know that there are other books in the franchise that go into prequel territory and they explain some of the concepts and landscapes. I think you should have done that for the main storyline instead, you know, because it leaves you a little bit dry when you're guessing, like wait, this character is doing this and they're referencing things that we haven't seen, what exactly are they and when you do find out, it's, you know, it needed a little bit more substance I guess for some of its explanation. At the end of the day, Skydall is a book about many things which include the struggles of ideologies and how you politicize ideologies and philosophies and how you turn them against people, commercializing things like religion or in the case of the story, the miracles and how you can manipulate people doing so. But in the midst of all this, you have a protagonist who is discovering who she is and why she is so special, because there's more to her than meets the eye. At the core of any good story, there has to be a fascinating character for you to gravitate towards. If you don't have that, the story can seem kind of aimless, but in the case of Skydall, Noah is pretty interesting in my opinion. He starts out as this Skydall, a big mechanized doll and she possesses an infinite amount of curiosity and wants to explore the world, but as she starts learning about her connection to plot elements of the book, it all forces her to mature and sort of take the lead in this story. Also one of the aspects that I mentioned earlier about the setting, the world, the buildings and architecture, I should say, a lot of it is based on real things from history, from I believe I read online that Ludovica's world is inspired by the Baroque period. You also have the Aqua Planet, which is very 60s and 70s, groovy inspired style and art with the psychedelic stuff. It's interesting. You also have Sudra, which is sort of an amalgam of things to create a new identity of sorts, so the book is really stylized in that regard and I highly praise it for it. Have you guys read Skydall? Let me know in the comment section down below. If not, let me know what are some of your favorite futuristic comics with androids and aliens and all that stuff. Very interested in finding out. Thank you guys for tuning in, thank you for liking, commenting, subscribing and being a part of a Wigging Geekdom. It truly does mean the world to me. Thank you so very much. Remember to hit the notification bell on this YouTube channel so you know when new videos pop up and check out the merch store if you can, link in the description below. I've got to go. I will catch all of you on our next episode. Bye. Bye.