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ABIDA is a comic set in a very distant future in Multan, where technology has become intertwined with religion, but fanaticism is still very much prevalent.

Conceived by a creative team including Arafat Mazhar, a story of rebellion is told through a superb art style and unique aesthetic dubbed “sufi-punk” — according to a press release, it’s “speculative storytelling anchored in the spiritual, cultural, political and technological inheritances of South Asia and Islam”.

It’s also a vision of what might happen if we carry our current social status quo into an uncertain future. On the page this manifests as a mix of futuristic architecture and fashion with the traditional, merging the familiar with something that has yet to exist. It’s like they took Cyberpunk 2077 and set it in Pakistan.

I absolutely love this art style and can’t recall a similar setting off the top of my head, let alone one that holds a certain degree of authenticity. Neon signs are in Urdu, skyscrapers are domed and buildings appear to have been designed with geometric shapes, much like Islamic architecture. It’s a pretty unique setting when put alongside other cyberpunk settings like Blade Runner.

On the surface, the one-issue comic looks superb. The book itself is of a very premium quality; hardbound and with glossy pages similar to something you’d find in a graphic novel from Marvel or DC. I’m not sure whether this is exclusive to the deluxe edition, which was sent to us by the team at Puffball Studios, but I’m impressed nonetheless.

The Rs3,500 76-page deluxe edition also contains interviews with the creative team and, my personal favourite, concept art showing how sufi-punk was brought to life. The standard version has 34 pages and costs Rs1,800.

In terms of its story, ABIDA presents us with a future where society worships what I can only assume is an AI known as Al-Mutahir, which has “prophecies” in the form of digital files stored within people known as recordkeepers. These people literally have entire parts of their body converted to store data and are considered holy figures.

The titular protagonist and her crew are out to steal a file from one of these recordkeepers in a really well-conceived data heist sequence, which, again, reminded me of Cyberpunk 2077 and also offered a novel way of decrypting the data. I won’t spoil it since it’s worth the read, but it sets up the protagonist’s main arc in the rest of the series.

However, there are some panels where characters’ proportions seem off. It looks like Mr Fantastic, with stretched arms that look comically massive compared to the rest of the body. It’s only visible in a few instances, but it stood out for the wrong reasons.

So far, this project is something genuinely interesting and I’m looking forward to reading the rest, ideally in a single volume. The world is what genuinely fascinated me here, with its aesthetic and lore, and I really want to see more world building in ABIDA.

I’d also love to see more sufi-punk or even “desi-punk” (that’s a thing, right?) stories in general across all mediums. As a gamer, an adventure in a setting like this would be really cool, but also unique since it’s a largely under-acknowledged setting.

ABIDA was created and written by Mazhar, illustrated by Arsalan Rafique, coloured by Samra Shireen and lettered by Breeha Tarar. It marks Puffball Studios’ branching out to create Puffball Comics. Puffball Studios has previously worked on several short films, including Sheher-e-Tabassum and Swipe.