Mungo Tomson’s Einstein #1 is a comic book without characters, captions, or speech bubbles. Instead, it examines the technology-laden, distopic fantasy world of modern comics by focusing on its background imagery. Tomson mines his own collection of comic books, redrawing a series of comic cells in which he preserves the original artist’s style but omits the characters that would identify its origin. The result is not just a conceptual exercise; Thomson’s sequence of drawings form a surprisingly cohesive story. As Sharon Mizota writes in the July/August 2008 issue of Art on Paper, “The work’s narrative continuity is due in part to Thomson’s deft splicing, but it also relies on our familiarity with comic-book archetypes. Beginning in outer space, the viewer enters a dilapidated space station and proceeds through a disheveled command center into a dark room crammed with broken electronics, dossiers, and papers. From there, one exits into a ruined city. A flash of lightning beams down from the sky, catapulting the viewer back into outer space, past exploding satellites and asteroids, and down to the molecular level, which — surprisingly — is populated by flying horses and lumpy squidlike creatures. From there it’s more asteroids, explosions, and a door into a different space station, suggesting the beginning of a new adventure.”