The Brooklyn Rail

It’s a beloved cliché in anime that when a character sees something exciting, their eyes literally sparkle or gleam. In GLEEM, the debut graphic story collection of Dominican-born illustrator Freddy Carrasco, the entire future gleams. Over the course of three interconnected vignettes set in Afrofuturistic landscapes—“Born Again,” “Swing,” and “Hard Body”—we explore the artist's fascination with futurity and alternative realities. There’s talking fish and cyborgs and wondrous pictorial speculation.

Carrasco, who grew up in Toronto but currently lives in Japan, has a singular artistic style: an aesthetic fusion of hip hop and manga. His lines are free-spirited but still elegant. “Born Again” introduces the first protagonist, Femi, a young boy with spiky hair that shoots out in all directions, giving him a star-shaped silhouette. He is dying of boredom on a pew during a church service. After doing his best to shake off this listless feeling, his curiosity leads him to a mysterious box on the floor that is emblazoned with the phrase “GOD IS GOOD.” Inside the box are five large candy-sized balls that look like fish eyes. He plops one into his mouth, not realizing that they are hallucinogenic. Thus begins a fever dream. This trippy effect is half horrifying and half whimsical, reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film My Neighbor Totoro (1988). The link between Miyazaki and Carrasco’s work also extends to both illustrators’ fascination with the contrast between the innocence of childhood and the sobering nature of reality, which leads the authors to not only champion children’s perspectives, but also to center young protagonists in stories with literal and figurative gray areas such as anxiety dreams and post-apocalyptic futures.

Carrasco expertly telegraphs action and feeling with simple techniques like saturation and changes to the panel layout from page to page. Some arrangements include page-sized panels, while others carry details over from one panel to the next, like a long splash of water that breaks an image up into pieces across several panels, creating a jigsaw effect. In another, Femi’s falling body appears superimposed over three separate squares, breaking the concept of a panel border altogether. The sequence of images in “Born Again” is surreal and oneiric, but the marble candy remains a visual anchor through this fever dream, securing the structural integrity of the story. Femi’s trip is cinematic, beautifully designed chaos.

Though Carrasco’s playground is the spectacularly maximalist realm of Afrofuturism with its Black-centric cyberpunk visuals, the book is stylized minimally. Its 206 pages are mostly black and white, with the first instance of color not arriving until page 170. In Femi’s story, this absence of color creates ambiguity, as hallucinations bleed and morph into one another, like when he enters a black void that could be deep space or deep sea, with both a giant squid and planets.

In the next story, a trio of kids band together to rescue their cyborg friend who will be retired without their intervention. It’s the type of Goonies-esque adventure that is the hallmark of both American coming-of-age stories and shonen anime. Except this story’s undertones are sinister instead of wholesome, touching on the cold promise of innovation and the lengths some would go to keep what they love from being left behind.

In a pivotal sequence, the kids play at a park, high on the effects of the same “pop” candy Femi took, and one of them imagines himself committing a violent act of cannibalization to restore their cyborg friend and keep their family intact. The background of the panel is the fuzzy static blur of a malfunctioning television, and Carrasco draws deep long lines over the boy to convey his inner panic, crystallizing the cruelty of their world.

A sense of hard-won community also hums through the final story. It is the only story to use color and the one with the least dialogue. In it, Black and brown clubgoers decked out in a futuristic equivalent of Tokyo streetwear—with technological fashion accessories—flirt and dance and gleam in bruised shades of blue and purple light. The entire vignette is an extended snapshot of a party where all the attendees are connected.

Deliberately drawn through the lens of young eyes, these tales are not mawkish fables intended to remind readers that children are the future. Rather, the decision to center on youth comes from a reverence and understanding that reality and possibility can best be recalibrated and reimagined by the young. Carrasco’s panels pulse with youthful energy—inquisitive, impatient, dauntless.