God of Comics – Generation Gone #1
Generation Gone #1 (Image Comics)
So… we’re kinda fucked. Millenials and Xellenials, we’re kinda being destroyed by the people that came before us. Their greed and shortsightedness is basically costing us everything, and making sure there won’t be any generations after us. Boomers accuse us of killing everything from the diamond industry to capitalism in general, all while fostering the murder of every living thing on the planet.
It would be nice if there was something we could do about it.
There doesn’t seem to be, at least not within the systems we grew up with. The Boomers rig everything and then seem horrified when their worst case scenarios play out – Congress shutting down, Donald Trump as President, the death of the American Dream. It’s why so many of our heroes, now, are criminals.
We’re told crime doesn’t pay by people who are legal criminals, accepting bribes and working against the best interests of anyone that isn’t a corporation, and what we got for our legal lives is spat upon and uncertainty and nothing. Meanwhile, the people that are supposed to be upholding the law break it, the people that are writing the laws break them, and the very wealthy ignore the law and shit on the rest of us.
Of course, our heroes are criminals. If you’re going to die and be miserable because the law says you must, that is a law that is no longer moral. Fighting against that system isn’t just a moral choice, but a human one.
Here’s the thing: we invented society and corporations and everything else. If they are no longer working for us or are actively killing us (currently they are doing both), then we need to change those systems.
That sort of culture shift is already being presented as an idea in comics like this one, because art and literature are where dreams are born and fostered and anything worth living for comes from. Writers Andre Araujo and Ales Kot presents three poor and angry hackers living in what’s left of America circa 2020, and they realize they have nothing left to lose.
They’ve also got superpowers they never wanted, a weird capacity for sun travel and weird black goo, high passions in nuclear factories, and all the love, hate, anger, and loss that comes from living on the very edge of survival. This is what it means to be young in the world in 2017 – to work harder than any generation in history and get nothing for it, and then be told to shut up when you complain because the one thing Boomers do better than ruin everything is gaslight.
Andre Araujo has worked some Spider-Man comics at Marvel and some Assassin’s Creed comics for Titan and some The Legend of Isiscomics at Blue Water. He’s good people and the sort of writer who works some strong young versus old and evil themes into a lot of his works. Ales Kot is, if anything, even more woke: this guy worked onZero and Occupy Comics and Liberator. If people are supposed to write what they know, these two are writing what they live and breathe, and this is going to be awesome.
They’ve nabbed Chris O’Halloran for art, too, and he’s the pen behind James Bond and a host of other comics at both Image Comics and Dynamite Entertainment.
What we’re trying to say is this comic has a high chance of being a sleeper hit, the sort of thing that people will talk about in the same breath as V for Vendetta or Transmetropolitan… provided we’re all still alive in five years or so.