Review
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Title: Future Day Saints: The New Arrivals
Author and Illustrator: Matt Page
Publisher: Matt Page
Genre: Graphic Novel/Sci-Fi
Year Published: 2023
Number of Pages: 100
Binding: Hard
Price: 35.00
Reviewed by Steven L. Peck
Page’s entire Future Day Saints project is a masterpiece. I’ve collected, read, enjoyed, and treasured all the other volumes in this series, and his new one, The New Arrivals, is an essential and excellent new chapter. The story is wonderfully timely and so beautifully told. A story of welcoming a new group of arrivals from another planet to the world of New Zion. The “people” (I lack a collective word to describe all the beautiful folk-kinds that appear in Page’s work) who live in New Zion willingly embrace more diversity being added to their world. Their actions exemplify what it looks like to live where belonging is honored by offering unreserved welcome to newcomers. Showing the repair of old hatreds and friendships in a way that I wish we saw more of in our world.
I love The New Arrivals. It is so well done, the art so imaginative and uniquely Matt Pagey; it just shines with originality. I love to see these volumes coming into the world and think of each as an art object itself because of its beauty and execution. And as always, I find my eyes a little moister and my heart larger when I finish these volumes. What’s been so delightful about these stories from a future Zion is how the characters are so imaginatively created. I smile just thinking about Liahona, Triple Combination, the so clever Good Bishop and Bad Bishop, who look identical. All the characters are great, and the remaining inhabitants who have migrated to New Zion with unique stories and histories are “fantastic” in every sense of the word I can think of. These books are for all ages, and my kids and grandkids love them, but what I find so compelling about them is the ideas they articulate at multiple levels and for every age group, especially about what an LDS version of Zion could look like. The inhabitants of New Zion instantiate a model of the concept of Zion, and what extraordinary potential we have to change the universe.