The Matrix is one of the most popular media franchises of all time, but very little of it has delved into events before the first film. Judging by one comic story that tells of the events that led to the machines taking over, The Matrix is ripe for more prequel stories set in this world.
Even the biggest fans of The Matrix may not know about the Wachowskis’ history in comics. Lana Wachowski received her first professional credit working on Clive Barker comics published by Marvel. This is where she first met artist Steve Skroce, whose storyboards would later be a key factor in getting The Matrix produced into a feature film. The Wachowskis were deeply enmeshed in the world of comics as both fans and creators, so when their sci-fi epic was released in 1999, they commissioned several famed writers and artists to make comics set in their world that would be posted to the film’s official website. The Wachowskis wrote one themselves, with art provided by Geof Darrow, the legendary artist of Hard Boiled and Shaolin Cowboy, who also served as the main conceptual designer of the films.
Titled “Bits and Pieces of Information,” the four-page story tells the tale of B1-66ER, the first A.I. machine responsible for the death of a human in the world of The Matrix. A robotic butler, B1 kills his owner once he discovers he is going to be deactivated and replaced with a newer model. B1 is later put on trial as the world debates whether or not he is entitled to the same rights as a human being. The robot butler is eventually ruled to be a machine and not entitled to any rights whatsoever, and is deactivated by the state. This winds up being the spark that starts the machine war with the humans, as A.I.’s across the world rise up against their human masters and ultimately overthrow them from power.
“Bits and Pieces” Proves That The Matrix Needs More Prequels
Even though it’s only four pages, “Bits and Pieces of Information” contains a wealth of story material—as evidenced by The Second Renaissance Parts 1 & 2, the animated adaptation of the story that appeared in Geof Darrow’s retro-futurist design for B1-66ER is immediately striking, which makes a prequel exploring the world before everything fell apart very compelling.
One of the complaints often lodged against prequel stories often revolves around audiences already knowing how the story ends—how much can we get invested in a young Anakin Skywalker if we know he lives to become Darth Vader, for instance? Yet “Bits and Pieces of Information” and its animated adaptation show that prequels can fresh and inventive by showing the story from a different perspective, thus deepening the mythology of The Matrix.
