Shin Zero, Vol 1-Advance Review

Title: Shin Zero, Vol 1

Publisher: Oni Press

Written by: Mathieu Bablet

Illustrated by: Guillaume Singelin

Translation: Dan Christensen

English Re-lettering: Chris Northrop

Release Date:  March 4th, 2026

Price: $19.99

Solicit:The award-winning creators of Carbon & Silicon and Frontier team up for an explosive new series!

Twenty years ago, the last Kaiju, a giant monster from the sea, was defeated by the Sentai, a group of colorful vigilantes. Today, Sentai are mere shadows of their former selves, relegated to low-paying odd jobs. Warren, Nikki, Heloise, Satoshi, and Sofia are part of a new generation of rent-a-hero trying to find their place in this disillusioned world where heroes have disappeared...

Shin Zero is a book of combinations. It is French sci-fi cartooning and Japanese monster manga, slice-of-life meditation and high concept action-adventure, an entry in the 75-year-old tokusatsu genre and a profoundly modern story of gig-economy workers, and it is a synthesis of the talents of Mathieu Bablet and Guillaume Singelin, with Bablet writing and Singelin illustrating.

...high concept action-adventure, an entry in the 75-year-old tokusatsu genre and a profoundly modern story of gig-economy workers...

The book follows five early-20-somethings, Warren, Hélloïse, Satoshi, Nikki, and Sofia—though I quickly came to know them instead as Green, Blue, Red, Pink, and Yellow—who all work as Sentai, dressing up in color-coordinated motorcycle gear to do… things.

They aren’t the Power Rangers, taking on globe-threatening kaiju or elite vigilantes keeping the streets safe. They’re poorly trained gig workers, taking client-submitted jobs from an app doing things like guarding a convenience store or escorting drunk folks home from the bar. They’re not saving the world; they’re chasing that five-star rating.

They all signed up for different reasons, and uncovering and exploring those reasons is the largest part of Shin Zero’s narrative and emotional core, so I won’t go into them here. Instead, I will only say that Shin Zero is at its strongest when it is just spending time with these five messed up people—too old to be kids, but definitely not yet adults—trying to navigate their daily existence.

Bablet wisely chooses to keep most of the book’s focus there. Most of their jobs we see only brief snippets of, and instead he lets us sit with their nerves beforehand and their roiling emotions after. We watch them interact with their families and go to school and go for a night out with no costumes in sight.

It’s in these moments that Shin Zero reveals itself. The big lizard was never the point of Godzilla. That was about what the lizard represented, and how the world reacted to him. Shin Zero isn’t about costumed vigilantes. It’s about young people searching for their place in a rapidly changing world. The costumes are just an excuse to heighten that and to amplify the drama.

Shin Zero isn’t about costumed vigilantes. It’s about young people searching for their place in a rapidly changing world.

These are themes that Singelin and Bablet have both explored in their past works, and they compliment each other beautifully here. Bablet has a real talent for small character moments within uncaring organizations, and Singelin’s detailed renderings and stellar character designs infuse every panel with vitality and angst.

Singelin draws heavily on the grammar of manga as he constructs his panels and pages, and his art is almost entirely black and white with only screentones for shading. The only color throughout the book—aside from a few almost hallucinatory moments of impressionistic subjectivity—comes from the costumes of the sentai. This is why I learned the five characters by their colors, not their names.

The result is not only a striking amplification of Singelin’s already masterful art, but a beautiful reflection of the five leads’ experiences, chasing a vibrancy and purpose that they each, for various reasons, believe they can only find inside their helmets.

I must finally address that I’ve been lying slightly in calling this book Shin Zero. Properly, it is Shin Zero Volume 1, and it is very definitively just the first part of a larger piece. It ends nominally at the conclusion of an arc, but that arc is defined by the larger story of kaiju and sentai, which is not the book’s actual focus.

Within the characters’ emotional narrative, the ending is abrupt and arbitrary. Almost nothing is resolved. Very little has reached a climax or even begun climbing up the slope of rising action. Several critical threads have been introduced but never explored further.

I have no doubt that by the end of the 3-volume series these things will reach an appropriate ending, but it was quite jarring when I turned what I didn’t even realize was the final page to reveal simply “TO BE CONTINUED.”

As it currently stands, Shin Zero doesn’t surpass its creators’ others works for me, but it is hardly fair to compare this fragment to a finished story like Singelin’s Frontier or Bablet’s The Midnight Order. When all 3 volumes are complete, this might very well be my favorite from either of them. Until then, it is a beautiful setup for what will come next, and I am eagerly waiting to see how these two deliver on the promises they’re making here.

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