Comic review: Dark Gods #1- Facebook must be destroyed

Writer: Justin Jordan
Artist: German Erramouspe
Publisher: Avatar Comics
Released: 29th October 2014



This was a strange book. It was almost dead over target, but something went wrong with the guidance systems and its payload ended up being harmlessly scattered over barren wasteland.

I’ll explain.

The narrative begins with a typically white-bread protagonist (think Matt Damon or Mark Wahlberg) telling us that he works for an evil corporation that is carrying out behavioural experiments on it’s users. So far, so good. This is exactly what Facebook was caught doing recently. However, his solution to the problem is to feed this information to the government. What? The government that has been spying on everybody through the NSA? The government that allows huge tax breaks to corporations then uses backdoors in their software to data-mine all of the information the corporations are gathering, including spying on all of our emails? Yes, that government. Why is this guy trusting them? Why would anybody go to the government? My answer? They don’t. They go to alternative media sources like Infowars and Wikileaks. If they went to the government they would be hushed up, arrested, or worse.

Our heroes, Pharaohs and scientists.

Do you see what I mean by ‘strange’ book?

The book then gets even weirder when evil creatures explain to our generic hero that they are feeding on humanity. Who is this guy? Why should we care about him? Do I even care if the monsters eat him? Not really, he’s leaking information to government, so he’s not exactly somebody to root for.

We then get the back-story of the entire human race. There is no God, and humans were created out of nothing. So far, so mainstream. Humans needed gods, so the demons came in, pretending to be those gods. They gave us technology, but this knowledge gave these ‘Dark Gods’ more power over us. Opposing the Gods are men who do things for themselves. These men are pharaohs, scientists and Braveheart apparently. What the Hell? Why isn’t government being mentioned here? What is the one core building block of human slavery that has doomed our entire race since the dawn of time? It’s Pharaohs, Kings, leaders and government. If any demon wanted to gain control over humanity all he would have to do is gain control over the leaders and structures of a society.  When in control of the leaders the demon would control religion, science, history, medicine, education, politics and entertainment, all of the building blocks, and control systems of society. It would be a pretty crappy demon if it limited itself to just one sector of society like a social media website wouldn’t it?

Gods are demons pretending to be Gods. No mention of Islam yet.

Any half-decent control freak demon would want centralised power. The demon would concentrate on government. The biggest and most powerful government in the world today is the US government. The demon would concentrate all of it’s energies on gaining control of this government and would then push for a one-world government so it has centralised control over the entire planet.

It would attempt to establish a New World Order.

That makes sense, right?

The underlying problem with this book is that it wants to tell us a story about evil gods who have been with us since the days of Adam and Eve, but it doesn’t want to link them to government. What sort of useless, feckless villains are they? They want to control and suck off the life force of humanity, but they have no interest in the control systems of humanity? They have no interest in money and power, but they are all over facebook?

That makes no sense whatsoever.

The book ends with a strong independent feminist rescuing our protagonist from the villains, thus emasculating the man, as is traditional in mainstream comic books today, and kind of ending the story in one panel. I have nothing to look forward to now, no reason for picking up issue #2. There is no mystery here, everything has been revealed. The protagonist is a wuss and it looks like the government is going to be the good guys.

Man inventing gods, and evolutionary theory of course

How can a comic book get so close, yet utterly miss the target?

It’s bizarre.

I’ll conclude this review with some speculation, and posit another reason why it all went so wrong. There was a lack of a moral guidance in the story. There was no God, just nothing, and out of the nothing came evil. There was no creator, no deep spiritual moral understanding that we are eternal spiritual beings inhabiting flesh bodies for a short period of time to learn and expand in consciousness.

In place of deep spiritual moral truths there was Braveheart and his modern equivalent, a shotgun wielding feminist with a short haircut and revealing cleavage. I know it’s popular to believe in a godless world these days, at least in the neo-liberal west, but the lack of spiritual awareness leaves a gaping hole in the human psyche, leaving us open to attack by Dark Gods and stupidly relying on government to save us. It’s not progressive, or liberal, or smart, it's just stupid and leaves us easy prey for our real-world government slave masters.

This book gets closer than most, but a lack of understanding about deeper moral truths, human slavery and the eternal nature of the human soul means it’s just another monster book with the usual cast of feminist liberal drippy statist characters.

Rating: 3/10 (For acknowledging that Facebook is a data mining/surveillance control system.