Gangrene Review: Carlos Trillo and Juan Giménez Build a Future Out of Humanity’s Garbage

WEPAAAA! Now THIS is some grimy-ass science fiction, fam. Gangrene drops you into a future where humanity didn’t save the planet, we basically turned the damn thing into one enormous landfill and learned how to live on top of the mess. Carlos Trillo and Juan Giménez aren’t interested in shiny spaceships and spotless utopias. Their future smells like rust, oil, garbage and bad decisions. Alien Books is bringing this Argentine sci-fi story to English-language readers for the first time, and from those opening wasteland spreads, Giménez makes it clear that we’re entering a world where civilization technically survived, but I’m not convinced anybody should be bragging about it.

Trillo builds the story around one nasty contradiction. The people of White City live above the filth with technology, military power and the luxury of pretending the world beneath them ain’t their problem. Down below, the so-called Cave People survive inside humanity’s garbage, scavenging whatever the privileged literally throw away. Alma and Mempot belong to that world, and through them the book gets personal instead of becoming fifty pages of “rich people bad, poor people good.” Alma is tough, suspicious and more complicated than the soldiers initially assume, while Mempot has this wonderfully foul little survivor energy that keeps some humor crawling through all the misery. When their path crosses Envoy, a soldier from White City, Trillo starts poking holes in everybody’s assumptions about who the monsters actually are.  

What I really dig is that Trillo doesn’t spoon-feed this world to you. You’re learning how this civilization functions while people argue, travel, fight and occasionally try not to die. The class divide is everywhere, but the book doesn’t need somebody standing on a soapbox every three pages explaining environmental collapse, authoritarianism and inequality to us. You SEE it. White City hoards comfort while the wasteland population gets radiation, garbage and scraps. The military talks about order and civilization while treating human beings like disposable material. Then Envoy spends enough time around Alma and her people to realize the official story he’s been fed has some serious mierda baked into it. That’s where Gangrene gets its teeth.

And coño, Juan Giménez! This book could lose every word balloon and I’d still spend an embarrassing amount of time staring at these pages. His environments are absolutely filthy with detail. Pipes snake across landscapes. Dead machinery becomes architecture. Aircraft feel heavy enough to actually fall out of the sky. Cities rise from mountains of industrial waste like somebody built civilization inside the corpse of another civilization. Giménez makes complicated pages readable too. That’s the veteran sauce right there. You can have bodies, weapons, vehicles, debris and machinery everywhere without the action becoming visual arroz con mierda.

His character work is just as strong. Everybody looks like they’ve actually been living in this busted world. Faces are weathered, uniforms are stained, armor looks repaired instead of freshly manufactured, and Alma’s design tells you damn near everything about her environment before she starts talking. Even the White City soldiers aren’t polished action figures. Giménez gives machinery and flesh the same battered physical weight, which makes the whole world feel used rather than designed. The muted browns, dirty oranges, metallic grays and cold blues give the pages this beautifully diseased atmosphere. Nothing looks clean because nothing should look clean.

If I’ve got a knock, it’s that Gangrene can be dense as hell. Trillo throws politics, class warfare, military hierarchy, environmental collapse, rebellion and a developing relationship into a relatively compact story, and there are stretches where conversations are doing a lot of work while Giménez is simultaneously throwing enough visual information at you to fill three comics. This ain’t something I’d recommend speed-reading while checking your phone between pages. Slow your ass down. The upside is that the density gives the world texture, and the second half pays off a lot of what the first half quietly loads into the chamber.

What ultimately sold me is how ugly the book allows its central idea to remain. There’s no shiny speech that magically fixes generations of exploitation. People die. Systems protect themselves. Even characters who recognize the truth still have to decide what they’re willing to sacrifice because recognizing injustice and actually standing against it are two very different things. Alma never becomes some spotless revolutionary symbol either. She’s still a survivor carrying the wasteland on her back and still ready to fight. That’s Gangrene in one image for me. Humanity built a future on top of its own garbage and then acted surprised when the rot worked its way upward. Trillo gives that idea the bite, Giménez gives it a world you can damn near smell, and Alien Books finally putting this thing in front of English-language readers is one hell of a reason to dig through the trash.

CRUSADERS SCORE:
4.5/5

Writer: Carlos Trillo
Artist: Juan Giménez
Editor-in-Chief: Matías Timarchi
Editor: Martín Casanova
Assistant Editor: Clara Bartolazzi
Consulting Editor: Fabrice Sapolsky
Translator: Marc Lainé
Lettering: Macarena Rodríguez
Design: Camilo Jorge
Publisher: Alien Books
English Edition: May 2026