Quell Your New Year’s Neurosis With These Two FREE Comics!
The new year often brings with it some serious soul-searching. Like the mid-year and end-of-the-year soul-searching, this beginning-of-the-year soul-searching is usually pretty depressing. Some folks will tell you to simply ‘snap out of it.’ Take a walk. Pop a pill. Buy a puppy. Not me. Over the years, I’ve found that the best way to stop feeling sorry for myself is to momentarily engage with something far more miserable — like, say, a maudlin movie or a particularly bleak book.
Don’t get me wrong. Human interaction works…sometimes. But other times it’ll leave you feeling far worse than before. That’s why I recommend art. Even at its most grim and gritty, well done art has the power to be life-altering. Inspiring, even.
This morning I had just such an experience with Gerardo Preciado and Daniel Bayliss’ two FREE, unofficial, online comics, Batman: The Deal and Superman: God’s End. Both of these comics are undoubtedly downers, yet both of them also planted the seeds of hope within me.
The first comic, Batman: The Deal, is basically another one of those ‘last Batman stories.’ While most comic book fans have read more than enough of these to last a lifetime, this one is different. Sure, it pits Bats against the Joker. And yes, the mutilation of one of Batman’s best friends IS what opens the story, serving as the catalyst that finally pushes Batman over the moral edge. (Comic book cliches or tried-and-true genre tropes? Either way, you have Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke to thank for providing the template.) Yet it’s The Deal‘s dialogue-free second half where the story breaks with tradition. As Batman and the Joker hurtle towards their inevitable end, Preciado and Bayliss use a long quote from a deceased comedian as both narration and commentary, and in the process create a comic that is as beautiful and elegiac as it is transformative.
Superman: God’s End is another ‘last story,’ only this time it’s Superman’s. The tale takes place “538 years since [Superman] arrived on this planet. 277 years since [he] left.” During that time, Superman has been exploring the universe, studying new life forms and “watching the primitive species,” all in an effort to gain back some of the happiness and hope that were stripped from him after too many years on Earth. Of course, humans being humans, their selfish and destructive ways eventually extend into the furthest reaches of space. Now Superman must finally deal with the problems (or is it simply ‘the problem’?) of humanity once and for all. Sad, somber stuff. Yet also deeply philosophical and — dare I say — spiritual.
Most articles that you read about ‘serious’ comics will go to great lengths to try and convince you that you don’t need to know a damned thing about superheroes to like whatever book it is that they’re pushing. Well, in this case, that’s untrue. These comics won’t hit the anti-capes crowd quite as hard as they hit me. But if you’re one of those lucky bastards raised on a steady diet of funnybooks, one of those comix nerds who never stopped reading about men who could fly and women who could destroy planets with their minds, Preciado & Bayliss’ comics will hit you like a punch to the gut — a punch to the gut that dislodges whatever bit of self-loathing you’ve been choking on since New Year’s Eve.
It’s almost as if all those years spent reading and re-reading the endless battles between Batman and the Joker were in preparation for The Deal; as if those countless comics about Superman attempting to awaken humanity to their full potential were just an extended prelude to God’s End‘s heartbreaking finale. Like so many other things in life, what you put into comics is what you’ll inevitably get out of them. Here’s hoping you put your heart into ‘em.
I really hope you take the time to read both these comics. Like I said at the outset, they’re free. Not only that, they’re freeing. That’s quite a combination!
My advice? Read ‘em in the order they were written. Start with Batman: The Deal, then read Superman: God’s End.
Special thanks to Bleeding Cool for the heads-up. You guys made my day with this one.
