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Human: the man of the future

500,000 years and more in the future. Disused satellites and space debris orbit around the Earth. Among these there is a structure that resembles a space station. Suddenly a module detaches and crashes onto the planet. After the explosion, we follow an animal that, from the top of a cliff, spreads its wings and flies to the impact site. From the relatively distant readers' point of view, the flying shadow could be a pterodactyl and the Earth we see, in reality, that of prehistory: even the vegetation and the gigantism of the environment would seem to suggest it. Instead, when we get closer to the impact site, the figure becomes more defined: it is a kind of monkey with wings.
The guides in the exploration of this regressed world of the future are Diego Agrimbau and Lucas Varela and they use a robot, Alpha, as their guide. His job is to assist the terrestrial scientist Robert who, together with his wife June, devised a complex plan to repopulate the Earth with homo sapiens. Robert, in fact, predicting the fate of extinction of human beings, has decided to freeze himself and his wife while waiting for the planet to recover from the ecological disasters left on its surface by the passage of the human race.
The project, however, collides with some problems: first of all the hostile environment, inhabited by different kinds of primates; hence the reduced number of robots available to Robert compared to expected; and finally the death of June, which pushes Robert into a state of complete madness.
The narrative, although substantially linear, reminds a lot the style of Frederick Peeters, while the story and the characterization of Robert recall JG Ballard. On the other hand, Varela's soft line is exquisitely francophile with a clear line and marked inking, while the composition of the table is fairly standard, mostly using the classic grid of 3 strips of 2 vignettes each.
Human builds himself one piece at a time, panel after panel, page after page. He alternates moments of silence, almost in contemplation of the new natural environment, with others full of dialogues, without forgetting the pure action, as one would expect from a world that has returned to the wild. The fundamental revelation of the plot, the one that gives meaning to the title, beyond the idea of recovering from extinction, is actually the very essence of evolution as told by Leon C. Megginson:
It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.

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