Reality TV is crossing a new frontier. Forget Marseille or Miami and go to Mars! With Phobos, Victor Dixen offers the first volume of the adaptation of his cult novel at de Glénat.
The Marseillais in space
The United States having exploded its debts, NASA was bought by a multinational that had a fantastic idea: to turn the conquest of space into a reality TV show. Through the Genesis program, six girls and six boys are selected to go to the Mars base of New Eden and populate the Red Planet. They will travel in the two separate compartments. Each week, everyone will have six minutes to seduce themselves under the gaze of the cameras. In Paris, Léonor, an eighteen-year-old orphan, decides to join them. Eighteen months later, she boarded the shuttle but kept a heavy secret. 
Romeo and Juliet in the stars
Phobos is an adventure of space exploration but above all a story of romance between young adults taking up the codes of young adult stories: Léonor, a 17-year-old worker, is an orphan and the adventure finds her in the subway by a flyer for the Genesis program. The young woman seems naïve in the first pages but she turns out to be intelligent and resourceful. More original, the book follows only women. These candidates come from all over the world (China, India, Canada, France, Germany and England) but the representation of these nationalities is still a little simplistic because, for the moment, the characters are univocal: the Chinese is the nerd of the group. The Indian woman was partly burned with acid and avoided an arranged marriage to come to the mission. Phobos also raises the question of beauty through these speed-dating of space. These women only exist if a man looks at them. Some candidates do everything to show off, even if it means lying. They fade to correspond to an archetype and seduce the male. In the Cupido shuttle, their only roles seem to be to copulate and then give birth once they arrive on Mars. The highlight of the show will be the arranged marriages of the candidates from the list of heart, a ranking of each established by each candidate. On the contrary, Leo refuses this game of fools to remain herself but she is penalized by the production. The vision of sexuality is currently very heteronormative and gendered. Women are necessarily different from women and both are made to be together. We can hope that the sequel to the comic book will bring a new vision of the genres. This scenario is not really helped by Brazilian cartoonist Eduardo Francisco. Despite successful sets, his digital style gives a stereotyped vision of beauty in total contradiction with the theme of the book.
Capitalism is scary in Phobos
Phobos denounces the society of the show because the space becomes a show with an executive producer but everything is not revealed in front of the cameras. Leo has a secret that explains his abandonment at three years old. On Earth, the vast majority of specialists running the company are fifty-year-old white men who hide the purpose of the mission. Finally, capitalism kills. The first volume of Phobos takes the reader into an intergalactic romance. We discover women subjected to the game of seduction but the young Leo rebels against these false pretenses and seeks to find her way. The mysteries are still numerous and the challenge of the trip is revealed at the end of the volume showing that love will be short-lived… If you are interested in science fiction stories, you can discover the chronicles on Amen and Fallen World
