Written by: Jason Aaron
Art by: RM Guera
Publisher: Image
Man was I excited for The Goddamned trade, which is finally out. I remember reading the first issue and being intrigued, though I couldn’t remember why I never read any further. Queue page nine. This comic is…well, just really unpleasant to read. This makes it hard to review, because the comic is—with absolute certainty—trying to be unpleasant to read.
So what happens when something succeeds at its goals with near perfection, yet you don’t like its goals at all?
The Goddamned is a biblical story about Cain. Cain invented murder and was cursed with eternal life as punishment, and as it turns out, eternal life sucks when the world is a barbaric wreck. So Cain wants to die. He’s like Wolfe in that respect, though in this story, God and angels are real, making one wonder what Cain expects the afterlife to be like. If Earth is Hell then Hell has to be really bad.
It’s not like God is going to grant him oblivion as an, “I’m sorry.” God is a bit of a prick.
It’s here that the comic excels, really. If you know your Bible you know that the biblical God isn’t a happy camper for the first half of it. He’s the kind of deity that’s cool with flooding the world because free will isn’t free when you don’t use it right, even if there weren’t any instructions written on stone slabs at this point. Cain, meanwhile, is the man that invented murder yet also the nicest character you’ll find in this wasteland of a world.
See, in this interpretation, God has a bit of a point. Earth is a mess, so much so that it’s almost hard to look at. This is a barbaric and bleak interpretation of the Old Testament, put to page by some wonderful artwork by RM Guera. Every panel is desolate and broken, and every person is unhinged and somehow more broken than the surroundings. Humans are eating each other because it’s the only good source of meat, and Cain is watching it all and going, “God is awful. This is his fault because he made us in his image.”
The “God is awful” motif only gets worse when Noah shows up, by the way. Jason Aaron, if nothing else, offers a fun interpretation of the character, though not a good one. Cain is the nice one here, remember?
I suppose I like the irony of it all. Noah is God’s chosen to save the world, yet here he is with a horde of slaves and zero sympathy for human life. At least Cain is apathetic to human life!
(I’ll take Russell Crow’s interpretation of the character from Aronofsky’s 2014 Noah, personally.)
The thing is, while the package here is interesting and clever as hell, it isn’t one I’d call enjoyable. Though perhaps that isn’t the right word, because the comic itself is…well, I’m glad I read it. Think of it this way: You probably have a movie or book or comic that you’ve experienced and enjoyed yet have no intention of ever going back to. For me, it’s Se7en. I’m glad I watched that movie, but I also never want to see it again.
The Goddamned is like that, only with less torture.
Well, maybe not less. Cain can’t die, and Noah ain’t a nice man.
I believe the problem to be one of execution. The Goddamned is so intent on being bleak, depressing, broken, and just outright nasty that it treads into edgy territory. For example, this comic is full of cursing. The first words anyone utters are, “Holy fuck!” and it doesn’t get any better. Everyone swears, and not just a little either. Unless the page you’re on is 100% artwork, expect to see at least one curse word show up.
Now, I can guess as to why there’s a lot of cursing in this book, but good reasons don’t make the execution any better. It’s too much. I’m fine with a well placed curse word (I myself swear almost all the time), but there’s just no art to it here. Calling God a cunt is shocking first and nothing second.
This edginess bleeds into the characters and even the environment too. I get that this book isn’t trying to be fun, and I get that it wants to make you wince, but it does so with shock first and wit second, which is a huge shame because the ideas here are sound. I love the irony at play, and I love this interpretation of Cain.
There is a lot of good writing here, but like the goodness of Cain, it’s covered in muck and blood.
The good news is that Cain has an arc, though the bad news is there’s no real payoff to it. Tonally, this thing is consistent from when it starts to where it ends, which is maybe its own problem. A joke or two would be nice. Maybe some exist, but I certainly didn’t laugh during the 150 pages this trade spans. I’d have liked to.
Artistically, I love what RM Guera does here with one big caveat: his action sequences are hard to follow. Mayhem is nice, and mayhem isn’t something that should be easy to follow, but when every fight is mayhem, it gets old. Call it action fatigue if you want, but I started skimming once Cain started swinging a weapon. One confusing fight sequence looks like any other.
But once again, we can go back to where we started: It’s not supposed to be fun. It isn’t supposed to be good or easy to follow because this whole book wants you to wince and look away from the barbarism, not revel in it.
The Goddamned excels in exactly what it wants to, which is to not be a fun experience. I didn’t have any fun, and that’s fine. It’s not a fun story. I don’t need every story to be fun to be enjoyable, but I also never really want to read or think about this one again. In that respect, I think it missed the mark. I’ll gladly reread a Nick Mamatas book despite all of them being bleak and awful, but he hits the humor and the sympathy, and if you’re going to go this dark, you need at least a bit of that.
The Goddamned is, well, goddamn.
