reMIND: The Complete Saga Review: A Talking Cat, Stolen Minds, and One Stunning Underwater Epic

WEPA! reMIND: The Complete Saga begins with a lighthouse keeper searching for her missing cat. Sounds simple, right? Nah, fam. Before long, we are dealing with stolen minds, brain-swapping experiments, armored talking animals, false gods, underwater lizard kingdoms, and enough mechanical madness to make Tony Stark ask who built the equipment.

Sonja is a gifted inventor living alone on a remote island with her cat, Victuals. When Victuals disappears and eventually returns, the body may look familiar, but somebody else is driving. The cat now carries the mind of a lizard-creature connected to Alizarin Crimson, an advanced civilization hidden beneath the ocean. That strange hook gets the story moving, but Jason Brubaker does not coast on the novelty of a talking cat. The mystery expands into a heartfelt adventure about identity, friendship, faith, corruption, and the people who manipulate belief to maintain power. It gets weird. It gets heavy. Most importantly, it stays entertaining.

Sonja is the heart of the book. She is smart, capable, stubborn, and refreshingly direct. She does not stand around waiting for some square-jawed hero to solve the problem. When her friend needs help, Sonja grabs her tools, builds what she needs, and gets busy. Her mechanical creations are more than cool-looking props. Building and repairing things is how she expresses love. Her connection with Victuals holds the entire saga together. Without that emotional relationship, the lizard kingdom, mechanical suits, transplanted minds, and spiritual warfare could have become a pile of stylish ideas fighting for attention. Sonja and Victuals make the danger personal. You care because they care about one another.

Brubaker’s DreamWorks Animation experience is visible throughout the artwork, but this never feels like an animated movie chopped into panels. He understands comic-book storytelling. Quiet scenes breathe, action sequences move cleanly, and major reveals land with the right amount of space. Even when the chaos erupts, the panel flow remains readable. No visual soup here. The lighthouse feels old, lived-in, and wonderfully isolated. Its worn machinery, dark corners, pipes, tools, and warm interior lighting tell us who Sonja is before the dialogue has to explain her. Once the story moves underwater, Brubaker changes the entire visual atmosphere. Cold blues, murky greens, bruised purples, and sudden blasts of crimson make Alizarin Crimson feel beautiful, ancient, and slightly diseased.

Victuals is especially fun to watch. Those huge eyes and simple feline shapes carry an impressive range of emotion. The character can be hilarious in one panel and deeply wounded in the next. Even inside armor or surrounded by larger, more elaborate creatures, Victuals remains the visual center of attention. That little cat has presence, yo. The book also has some sneaky body horror running beneath all the colorful adventure. Minds are removed, bodies are stolen, and identity becomes something that can be violated by people with enough technology and zero ethics. The story asks what truly makes someone who they are. Is it the body, the memory, the soul, or the relationships that survive the change? Brubaker lets those questions emerge through the characters instead of turning the book into a philosophy lecture wearing goggles.

The conflict involving King Erzats, Nahusthan, and the Invisible adds another layer. Alizarin Crimson is controlled through fear, ritual, mythology, and obedience. Its rulers understand that controlling belief is sometimes easier than controlling behavior. Different kingdom, same old hustle. Brubaker takes aim at corrupt leaders who use religion and authority as weapons, but he does not treat faith itself like a joke. The distinction matters. The story is concerned with false gods, blind obedience, and the danger of surrendering your conscience to anybody claiming divine power. That material gives the adventure some real teeth.

The pacing is not flawless. The opening takes its time, and a few portions of the underwater history arrive with more exposition than necessary. Some dialogue explains ideas that the artwork has already communicated, while a few supporting characters feel more functional than fully developed. There are moments when Brubaker wants to show us every pipe inside the machine after we already understand how the machine works. Still, once the story catches fire, it moves. The later chapters bring pursuit, betrayal, sacrifice, mechanical combat, and emotional consequences without losing the friendship established at the beginning. The finale earns its weight because this was never simply about defeating a ruler. It is about reclaiming identity from people who believed they had the right to own it.

This 15th-anniversary edition also delivers worthwhile bonus material, including concept art, production notes, rough layouts, models, paintings, fan artwork, and a look at the project’s long road from animation concept to webcomic, crowdfunding success, self-published graphic novel, and completed saga. That history is not filler. It shows what one creator can accomplish by developing an audience, trusting a strange idea, and refusing to quit.

reMIND: The Complete Saga is imaginative, visually gorgeous, emotionally sincere, and just the right kind of bonkers. It has talking cats, lizard autocrats, mechanical diving suits, stolen bodies, spiritual rebellion, and one determined inventor who will not abandon her friend. Jason Brubaker built something special here. It is strange, ambitious, occasionally overstuffed, and packed with genuine heart. That is indie comic-book magic, baby.

CRUSADERS SCORE:
4.5/5

Written, illustrated, and created by: Jason Brubaker
Editing and additional scripting by: Jeremy Barlow
Color assistants: Aaron Daly and Shari Chankhamma
Book design: Eben Matthews
Additional copy editing: Katy Kosek
Macroverse executive producers: Eben Matthews and Adam Martin
Publisher: Titan Comics / Coffee Table Comics

reMIND: The Complete Saga will hit the shelves on 13 October 2026.
Pre-order it now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and Forbidden Planet for the UK and Europe

TRAILER: