When your sink breaks, you call a plumber, but when gravity breaks, you call the FBP.
For some reason, the laws of physics have gone a bit haywire. Gravity may decide to stop working outside of your local high school, or time will decide to run a little faster inside your home than outside of it. When that happens, the FBP will come in and fix whatever's wrong. A relatively new agency, it's seeing a fair amount of change itself - veteran field agents who were there in the beginning, doing whatever it took to get the job done are suddenly finding themselves superseded by kids fresh out of college who have largely spent their lives learning about physics instead of seeing it. Agent Adam Hardy is caught between these two. The son of a physicist who disappeared when he was a child, he was attracted to the glamorous danger of the FBP's work. But physics isn't the only problem facing the FBP. Like anything government does, there are legislators who bristle at the idea of the government being the only one in charge of protecting people from physics and think that the private sector should have a whack at it. So when a bubble universe forms in a major metropolitan area, everyone is interested to see how the FBP handles the job. And in the case of Agent Hardy, he begins to quickly realize that there is more going on here than simple American politicking might suggest.
FBP is a comic that has been on my radar for awhile, but it wasn't until I bought a copy of this volume for my brother's birthday that I finally took the chance to read it. And I'm really glad I did. It's stories like these that I'm glad that comics exist. Simon Oliver's premise of "physics is broken" is perfectly suited to being told panel by panel, where art and color can also help tell you what's going on. He manages to explain to you what is going on, science-wise, and why that's not right pretty clearly (though, let's be honest - I'm a librarian, not a physicist, so I have no clue if his science is correct to begin with). And Robbi Rodriguez's art is fantastic. Slightly messy, he manages to convey energy and movement in his lines, even when the characters are standing or sitting still. Rico Renzi's coloring work is equally great, with muted colors contrasting perfectly from the brighter, almost neon colors denoting moments where physics is going wrong. If you're looking for science fiction that is closer to science fact, then you can't go wrong with FBP. I'm looking forward to reading more set in this world.
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