So as part of the Comic as Object Project, I want to share with you a series of comics called Sentient by Jeff Lemire and Gabriel Walta, published in 2019 by TKO Studios. A series of six, Sentient tells the story of the U.S.S. Montgomery, a deep space colony ship whose AI, VALARIE, must help the children left aboard survive after all the adults are killed.

But the story is not what’s important here, or even the format of the individual comics, really. What’s interesting about Sentient is the way all six issues were packaged for sale. Sure, you could have bought them individually as they came out, or you could have waited and bought this:

Ooo, and lookie there on the back…

The box has an ISBN, or International Standard Book Number, not a UPC or Universal Product Code. This box is a book.

And inside this ‘book’ are the six individual comics.

So this is the collected works? The Complete Sentient? A book that comes pre-disassembled into eight pieces? A collected works that requires no reformatting, reprinting, or rebinding… just the addition of a two-piece box to the publisher’s existing stock of comics.

And the comics are simply the original individual issues, down to each still having their respective UPC barcodes printed on the back of their respective covers.

So when is a box actually a book? When it’s a fancy box full of comics!

Happy reading!

– Winston