Writer, Artist & Colorist: Ugo Bienvenu
Letterer: Tom Williams
Translator: Edward Gauvin
Publisher: Titan Comics
Price: $29.99
Release Date: September 16, 2025
When Yves Mathon's father dies, he loses a vital link with his past. Still, he has a wife. They are expecting a child. He and Emy want to relocate to the heart of Paris. As he moves forward, Yves wonders what he is leaving behind. Should he bury the past like his father? Or should he protect it, even if it endangers his future? Let's grab a memory stick, leap into System Preference HC, and find out!
Story
For most people, these are philosophical questions. But Yves works for a bureau that monitors data storage. His bosses enforce their superiors’ edicts. Sandy and Bernard joke as they assign Yves to delete movies, books, and songs from the public record. While Yves erases films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, he must also remove any commentary, documentaries, or works associated with Stanley Kubrick's classic. Presumably, this means Arthur C. Clarke's novelization also gets scrubbed from existence.
Yves' wife worries about his sentimentality in System Preference HC. Emy fears that one day agents will show up at their home to arrest him. She spends her days working on Playmobil, an interactive game that, like social media, requires vast amounts of memory. Emy can't understand why Yves risks their future by stealing files and downloading them into their robot. After all, Mikki is a valued member of their family. Their robot cooks, cleans, and nurtures their developing child.
Ugo Bienvenu introduces a future in which the authorities erase the treasures of yesterday to ensure people can access whatever is hot today. Ironically, their robot Mikki sees Humanity most clearly. As the Bureau acts like machines, Humans find beauty and meaning in imperfection. Nothing lasts forever. But Yves believes that some things should. And in System Preference HC, this agent of destruction has a plan to ensure that the people of tomorrow get a chance to see what he values today.
Art
The straight lines of Yves' environment define his modern existence. From his black car to the flat he and Emy are considering buying, to the banks of public records he monitors, everything represents the faceless efficiency of the modern age. Yves' coworker often covers his head and eyes as he walks. Bernard and Sandy don seamless and featureless helmets, suggesting they are pillars of the community as they order the destruction of cultural riches. Yves wears a helmet evoking a raven as he complies with their wishes.
As Yves and his partner worry about getting investigated, two androids move like sharks through their department. Workers dub them Thomson and Thompson due to their similar facial features. But these homages to Hergé’s Tintin books are anything but bumbling detectives. Aside from their human heads, their bodies are yellow and black metal. Unlike Yves' similarly colored robot, their torsos are poles lacking a transparent womb.
Tom Williams saves small black uppercase letters in white boxes and balloons. He protects larger words on computer monitors and mobile phones. Tom Williams writes a flowing font across panels as Yves' superiors remind him that he's an archivist, not an art critic.
Yves may have his foibles, like honking at a religious procession as he drives home in his one-person car. Still, Yves smiles as booms accompany their gestating daughter inside her transparent womb in System Preference HC. Thanks to Titan Comics for providing a review copy.
Final Thoughts
Yves Mathon is a guardian of his community’s information resources. His job is to seek out and destroy works of Human creativity when public interest wanes. System Preference HC pulses with the totalitarianism of 1984, the relentless progressiveness of Fahrenheit 451, and the soul of Logan's Run, when anything over 30 years old is ancient and therefore obsolete.
Rating 9/10
To look inside see my preview of System Preference HC.
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