Damian Wampler‘s new comic book Sevara (drawn by Andre Siregar) appears at first to be your typical sci-fi adventure, replete with giant robots, samurai swords, and the obligatory hover bike. Yet this female-centric fanboy romp is also a rich and engaging look at the gender stereotypes, theological conflict, and ecological degradation.
Prepare yourself for the adventure of a lifetime as Sevara battles her greatest enemy – her own thoughts.
Sevara begins her life as a mortal girl, but is discovered by a group of immortal warriors. They give Sevara incredible powers, and together they work for hundreds of years to rid the world of evil. Once they’ve converted humanity back to a pastoral state, the warriors vow to give up their memories and their incredible powers so that humanity can hit the reset button. One by one, the immortals slip into stasis, erasing their own histories to give human beings a chance to create a new one. All of them, that is, except Sevara. And what she finds when she awakens is a world that nothing in her past could have prepared her for. Sevara awakens in a future so distant it looks like our past, and must battle her way through every era of mankind to save her world. From the stone age, the bronze age, medieval times, the Renaissance, industrialization, and eventually a future much more technologically advanced than our own, Sevara fights an evil that has twisted her words to brainwash mankind.
Sevara is rooted in today’s most pressing issues. Damian came up with the idea of Sevara while sitting in a religion class, thinking about what Jesus and other prophets would think of how humanity had interpreted their words, and originally wrote the story as a play. The visual aspects of the story however worked better as a comic book, so he adapted it and found artist Andre Siregar to bring it to life. Anang Setyawan provides eye-popping color, and letters are by Steve Wands.
Sevara wishes nothing more than to guide the human race back to a nirvana-type of existence, but it won’t be that easy. She must save the world again, but this time there are new dangers and new enemies. She wants to undo her mistake as quickly as possible, yet her impatience sometimes leads her down dark paths of revenge and betrayal.
To make matters worse, a clan of priests called the Rune Walkers has used the memories of her mortal life to create a new religion that now dominates the earth. Sevara’s past surrounds her as the rich and powerful take all of her good words and deeds and twists them for profit and personal gain. Now, abandoned and alone in an unrecognizable future, Sevara has to fight harder than she’s ever fought before to reclaim her broken world.