Gods have started showing up regularly in comics and graphic novels, everything from Thor and Loki in the various Avengers series to Titania and Auberon in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman andThe Books of Magic (no, they’re not gods now, but they were long ago) to Elder Gods too terrible to name in Hellboy and B.P.R.D., but I don’t know that anyone has every examined not only the nature of deity, but the morality of deity, before John Arcudi’s A God Somewhere.
In its simplest form, it’s the story of three friends, Eric and Hugh Forster and Sam Knowle, through some trying times. The major cause of the “trying times” is that Eric not only survived a horrendous explosion in his apartment building unscathed, but it seems to have left him with something close to godlike powers. At first he seems to be a beneficent god, but things start to go awry, and events lead to what may or may not be an inevitable conclusion.
Arcudi’s story is strong on psychology, although not in the introspective way we might expect — the moral quandaries of a Batman are pretty much absent. What we do see is the slow decay of Eric’s mind, from the early stages of megalomania when he feels he’s been specially blessed by God — he’s always been a believer — through his loss of any moral foundation at all. The effect on those close to him is as profound as it is damaging. To say that the story takes a turn toward the dark side would be a gross understatement, and yet the impetus for Eric’s turn toward the worse is obvious — the greed, the self-interest, even something so simple as Eric’s inability to understand any longer the priorities of daily life against Hugh’s inability to see how much his brother needs him, all work to make Eric into what we would call a madman.
Arcudi’s story goes some pretty difficult places, and Peter Snejbjerg’s art stays with him. Even in the early stages of the story, we see vividly that Eric is intense, cocky, and a little full of himself, characteristics that become more marked visually as they become more important to the story, until Eric is finally used up by it all. It’s a gory tale — Eric stops caring about people’s lives, especially those of the soldiers sent to stop him, and the results of that not caring — and of Eric’s phenomenal physical strength — are graphically rendered.
A God Somewhere is one of those rare stories that is told more in what is not said than what is. It’s not laid out so much as woven together, flashbacks butted up against the present to create a series of resonances until we suddenly realize we’ve been reading a very big story indeed. There are a lot of things that come into the story that I’ve left out of this review, lest it turn into a dissertation. There’s that much to it.
(Vertigo, 2011)
