Sparkplug Highlights: Rock That Never Sleeps, by Olga Volozova and Juliacks

What do we forget? How do we remember? At the heart of this arresting story by Olga Volozova and Juliacks is Rock That Never Sleeps, a mystical junkyard lost in time, filled with memories and kept by mysterious sages. If you take something from this place, though, you must leave something behind. This comic contains two connected stories about this mythical place.

The first, by Volozova, is done in a wispy sepia that recalls the fairy tales of old; it tells the tale of the beautiful, powerful, and female-dominated Katchia family. Puppetmakers who have skills and magic from the Old World, tragedy strikes when two members of the family lose their memories and are unable to continue their craft or carry on their heritage. They must risk everything to travel to Rock That Never Sleeps and reclaim their birthright.

Juliacks's stark and dreamlike black-and-white story takes place over one hundred years in the future; the majority of the Earth's population has lost their memories to technology, and only those with strange birthmarks can remember their own lives. Two of these seers take Redo, a young woman who has lost her past, to The Rock That Never Sleeps in order to play among their recollections and experiences. But what will Redo be forced to give up in return?

Like a surrealist folktale, Rock That Never Sleeps casually uses magical settings and scenarios to explore themes of family, the passing of time, the adherence to or loss of cultural traditions, the dangers of technology, and the importance of memory and storytelling itself. You will become ensnared in the characters' relationships and quests before you realize that you are thinking about how little you remember from your childhood, how you can't recall the song your grandmother used to sing, or how events you don't document online seem less real, or at least less memorable. Where would you go to get those memories back? What would you give to know what you used to know?