God is Dead #5

It's virtually impossible for a book with this title, this publisher, this premise, and these characters to not attract comparisons with Supergod, another story from Avatar Press about humanity mucking around with god-beings. The premise is actually astonishingly simple: all the gods of myth turn out to be real, and they come back to Earth to carve it up among themselves and squash the ants that call it home. A small group of the world's finest minds band together to figure out a way to stop them.

Predictably, the gods are too human for their own good, and immediately start murdering each other for total dominance of the Earth. It's the kind of thing that would be ironic if it hadn't been done a gajillion times before. Oh hey, the gods are flawed! Just like us! A plot point so cliched it dates back thousands of years! Large parts of this series are devoted to bloody multi-page brawls between the pantheons of divine beings, and every single time, it just feels so completely pointless. This issue has a somewhat cool scene where Zeus beats the crap out of everyone from Asgard, but aesthetics aside, the reader has zero reason to actually care about any of this. Supergod took the opposite tack by making it very clear that gods, by definition, were opaque to human understanding: you would not and could not comprehend how they thought and why they did the things they did. And in doing so, Ellis made his gods more fascinating and dangerous than anything in this book. No such luck from God is Dead. These gods are irritating, obnoxious blowhards who fail to arouse any kind of sympathy or interest, and if you've ever read books from Avatar Press, the gore is too mild for even the crude shock value audience. You might actually feel glad as you watch them fall one by one. Each god only has one goal in this series: to prove they've got a bigger dick than every other god.

For a series hyped as the brainchild of Jonathan Hickman, someone who allegedly writes high-concept science-fiction, you would need abysmally low standards to consider any of this "high-concept". Or "science-fiction". Retreating to Supergod, why were those beings so interesting? They were designed well, with features that evoked some amount of thought from the reader, and steeped in enough fake jargon to persuade you to go along with it. Krishna was a hyper-advanced AI who manipulated.the building blocks of his environment to turn thought into reality. Dajjal was a time-loose monstrosity that could see every possible timeline, and steered the world towards the apocalypse for no other reason than that it fascinated him. And so on, and so forth. You had to try and understand them because they were so completely alien, but everything here is just laid out in the open for you. And here's the problem with that: these aren't terribly interesting characters to begin with. Characterization never killed anyone. Try it sometime, Hicks.

Jargon is a pivotal component of science-fiction. Always has been, always will be. If your story's good enough, you can probably get away with jargon that's so simple a child could have written it, but this story's not, and therefore "Here is god juice! Inject it and you will be a god!" doesn't quite fly. At this moment you might wonder "Well, maybe the human protagonists are interesting?". You're so adorable when you're silly. The human protagonists are a rag-tag group of stand-ins for recognizable minds: one guy's obviously meant to be an Einstein analogue, another's obviously Hawking, and so on, with the obligatory "badass punk chick" character that unimaginative stories always seem to find a space for. The badass punk chick has a father who's just an ordinary Joe, but when things go to hell he's the savior because he's got the gun and the Bible. You can already see where this is going: at the end of this sordid tale, OJ's going to be standing tall while all the eggheads lie dead or worse. Ending in any other way would require some sort of nuance, which is non-existent here. There are a few interesting ways this could have played out. Early in the series, a character mentions something about how the gods might, in essence, just be tulpas: creatures that exist simply because people believe they exist. Nothing actually comes out of that idea, and we tread a generic, derivative path that determinedly ignores questions like how different faiths would react to the emergence of archaic gods. You know, stuff actually worth reading.

I wish I could say something about the art, but it's every bit as generic as the writing. It's not bad by any sense of the word; just aggressively unremarkable. Is this the worst thing Hickman's ever written? I don't know, I'd have to read Red Mass for Mars and get back to you. But it would have to be catastrophically awful to beat this series. If you want good value for your money, set fire to it. The warm glow of the flames will last longer than any entertainment this series could provide.