System Preference
Creator: Ugo Bienvenu
Translator: Edward Gauvin
Publisher: Titan Comics
Publication Date: September 2025
In the digital future, what if the cloud was finite and the internet was almost full? What if a world focused on short term commercial and algorithmically-defined interests decides what to keep? As new ultra-high quality social media content needs to be stored, something has to be wiped from existence to make room. Things no one in the future looks at anymore. Farewell poetry of W. H. Auden, or the oeuvre of Stanley Kubrick. It’s a terrifying prospect – and brilliantly explored in Ugo Bienvenu’s graphic novel System Preference, now available in English thanks to translator Edward Gauvin and Titan Comics.
Yves Mathon works at an overflowing data center. It’s his job to identify subjects that are forgotten enough that they won’t be missed, and submit them to his supervisors for complete erasure from existence. In Yves’ world, it is illegal to copy or back up something that is meant to be deleted – but he secretly does so anyway. What follows is a litany of consequences that involve Yves, his wife, his unborn child and the pregnant robonanny who also becomes the receptacle for the stolen data.
Almost every gloriously rendered page contains dialogue that reveals the superficial nature of art and culture in the future. Some dialogue can feel a bit too much like the author is delivering a soapbox speech but the story and ideas remain consistently engaging. We are shown a future that no longer cares about history, the past, the classics, or anything that isn’t brand new. Where everyone is plugged in but not culturally engaged. There are amusing in-jokes that bring this concept home, such as two android company-investigators being named after the bumbling twin detectives in Tintin but no one remembers the source of the specific appellation.
The art in System Preference is solid stuff, with a future depicted in vivid, garish colour; geometrically designed in such a way that it is reminiscent of science fiction media from the ‘60s and ‘70s. The colours gives the impression of a bright future that is steadily revealed to be a rather dispiriting – all too real – dystopia. Despite the comic being localised from French bande dessinée, where pages can contain upwards of ten panels, Bienvenu is rather restrained and sticks to the pace of a more familiar six panel grid – making the subject matter all the easier to digest. Also, when a full or splash page occurs, it is somehow breathtaking every time.
The book isn’t without a few flaws: the action sequences sometimes feel tonally out of place; there are points where the dialogue feels more like political diatribe, occasionally feeling a bit dismissive of certain progressive trends in contemporary media; and the characterisation in many respects feels rather uneven. Despite it all, this is the kind of comic that deserves to be picked up by anyone looking for thought-provoking science fiction.
System Preference is a brilliant allegory that amuses, intrigues, frustrates and leaves you lost in thought after the final page. It fundamentally asks what we as a society choose to remember and how we pass stories on…but covers so much more.
System Preference is available now
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English (US) · 