The Comic Book of Revelations

"Time and space never ending
Disturbing thoughts, questions pending
Limitation of human understanding"

Metallica - Through the Never


Been digging around for new webcomics recently, still holding out hope for the medium despite its gradual creative decline over the last two decades. Thus I hit upon the Russian comic Gifts of Wandering Ice, ostensibly set in a post-apocalyptic glacial world where dinosaurs jump out of thawing icebergs. Hints of psychic powers and prophetic dreams abound. Interesting enough crackpot notion on its surface. Unfortunately, it quickly resolves to a transparent vehicle for FEMale chauvINIST posturing. Its female characters are all hyper-competent embodiments of wisdom and courage; the spineless males spend all of their time either apologizing to women for doing everything wrong or being lectured by women on just how they're doing everything wrong. Two hundred pages' worth of exposition later, I've yet to see the unusual setting being put to any more use than one scene after another of boys and men soulfully declaring obeisance to their female social betters. Though, amazingly enough its matriarchal protagonists seem to be heterosexual - a rare affliction among any fictional figures other than villains, these days. As laughable a mess as it is, it did remind me that its setting trails a strange recent trend of post-apocalyptic fantasy comics, usually of a better stripe.

Derelict follows a nautical theme in a world haunted by mind-eating mists spewing light-allergic lizardfolk. Short on chatter and explanations, it nonetheless does a great job of showing its protagonist's scrabble for basic necessities, drifting through an inimical environment. All while building up plenty of mystery around the alien creatures and their Lovecraftian cult. If it ever comes out of "hiatus" it'll make a fine read.

Soul to Call is instead set in a cityscape infested with (again) a mind-devouring mist and littered with demons hungry for human flesh. Or souls. Or soul-flesh, it's not quite clear. Blood rituals, suicidal cults, paramilitary demon-hunter enclaves, magical amulets and assault rifles. Good stuff.

Stand Still, Stay Silent (probably the best of these) follows a group of Scandinavian adventurers in a reality depopulated by a demonic/fungoid infection mutating all mammals into deformed pus-sack monstrosities. The pre-Christian gods have (for no particular reason) returned, and lend their magic from behind the scenes to humanity's last-ditch survival efforts. Beautifully drawn, quite the tearjerker when it wants to be yet balancing this with suspense and humor, SSSS is just everything an adventure story needs in scope, detail, pacing and character interactions.

As I've noted before, post-apocalyptic settings have made quite a comeback after their post- Cold War slump, over the last decade since the 2008 economic crisis. On one hand, I'm amused at this notion that if we just manage to wipe out 99.99% of humanity, the rest of us will spontaneously develop Auspex and Evocation magics. On the other hand, while I'd love to see all three of these examples continue (and even Wandering Ice, were it to miraculously ditch its primitive gynocentric conceit) I have to wonder at whatever happened to good old-fashioned science fiction post-apocalypses. The Road, along with its excellent film adaptation and similar movies centered on a small group of survivors in realistic scenarios, like The Rover or How I live Now or Z for Zachariah make for satisfying watching, but they're very limited in their focus on paranoia, isolation by social desolation and small group dynamics. On the more fanciful side of things we did at least get a rehashed Mad Max wonder of cinematography, but aside from that? Zombie outbreaks still dominate the field from big-budget movies to single-artist webcomics, though the subject tends to careen between science fiction, science fantasy and straight-up fantasy.

What about a wider scope? Among computer games, Frostpunk stands out for retaining thematic coherence unlike say the Fallout games which have tended toward kitchen sink assemblies of cults, mutants, high and low tech. I would have expected some similar endeavors from webcomics. After all, societal collapse by itself can make for lavish visuals, especially with some single pervasive, game-changing science fictional element thrown in. It would be a bit annoying if instead comics like Derelict, Soul to Call or Stand Still, Stay Silent prove avant-garde heralds of a new fad and in another five years we'll be inundated with movies and TV shows about demon hunting after the fall. We should remember that post-apocalyptic fiction, especially in the Cold War interpretation which lent it its greatest appeal, concerned humanity's propensity for self-destruction with no outside help, demonic or otherwise, by greedily degrading the gifts of science.