Comic review: Our Friend Satan (the first seventeen pages)- A review of a Kick-Starter Project

Read comic here:
http://ourfriendsatan.com/comics/


Kick-Starter Page:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/imagomedia/our-friend-satan-graphic-novel



Why would Satan be depressed in 2015? The west has gone secular/atheist and the middle east is a Hell on earth with the west bombing it and funding, arming and training Sunni Muslims (ISIS) terrorists in order to take control of any country that is not part of neo-liberal western hegemony. Throw in the Ukraine and the western intervention there, and you have a world of chaos, no Christian God in sight, demonic Sunni Muslims beheading people on the daily news and a refugee crisis that gets worse by the hour.

A spooky beginning.

No, Satan wouldn’t be depressed, he’d be bloody, hellishly delighted. Satan has won, he was right, God was wrong. Humanity is dumber than ever, they cannot stop murdering each other, and millions of people don’t even believe in the immortality of the soul, and have been taught that humanity is nothing more than a bunch of over evolved monkeys that live, breed, fight and die. This is what Satan said in the very beginning. He argued that humanity was unworthy of the gift of life that was bestowed from the creator, and who would argue with him now?

That leads me to this kick-starter Graphic novel titled, ‘Our Friend Satan.’ The concept is that Satan is depressed. That intrigues me. How do you write a book where Satan is depressed when all you have to do is look around you to see that things couldn’t really be going better for the old red devil? What is going on here? I have to know more.

Let’s take a look.

The book begins with an evocation to the Devil, the art is very cuddly, the Devil appears, and he’s just an old, bald bloke in slippers. He's depressed because the Catholic Church are making him out to be far scarier than he actually is. Okay then, it’s not going to be a serious book. Instead it’s a book that’s going for laughs. The art is great by the way, very colourful, very professional, top drawer really, and a lot better than quite a lot of the haphazardly thrown together deadline chasing material that you get in Marvel and DC.

Then the Devil shows up, and the tone is set.

The setting is the future, so there’s no mention of anything contemporary, so scrub any mention of what is going on in Syria and Libya right now. That’s a good way to avoid controversy, and I don’t really like it.

I see it all of the time in mainstream comic books with characters like Captain America being sent to different dimensions where he can safely beat up some alien Nazi’s or something safe, thus ensuring that he doesn’t have to deal with the contemporary US foreign policy of arming terrorists and invading countries in order to maximise profits for western banks and corporations.

Captain America should say something about US corporate imperialism, but as long as he is safely hidden away in BattleWorld, he doesn’t have to.

I see the same thing happening here in ‘Our Friend Satan,’ but that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad comic. It’s a safe comic, and the villains are the future Catholic Church, so yep, it’s the Christians again who are getting it, and that’s disappointing, but not surprising. In this neo-liberal world of corporate consensus you are allowed to criticise the Catholic Church, to mock them, to make them look silly, or evil, and you’ll get no pushback at all.

The villains in the book are the Catholic Church.

If you mock Islam or Judaism then you’ll be in a whole heap of trouble, so comic book creators prefer to play it safe and leave them alone and attack and mock the one religion that it’s safe to mock. That religion is Christianity, the religion of the dying west, the religion that has been demolished by secular atheism and is currently being demolished by US backed Islamic terrorists in the middle east.

All of the villains in ‘Our Friend Satan’ are white, middle-aged men. That’s also something that you are allowed to do in 2015. What you don’t do is have women, or women of colour, or homosexual women of colour (that would be the worst thing to do) as villains. Keep the villains white, middle-aged, male and straight, and you’ll be okay with the PC brigade. Does that annoy me? It used to, but now, it just bores me, and tells me that the writer and artist are obediently ‘progressive’ in their world-views. I don’t hate it. I expect it.

‘Our Friend Satan’ then is a happy, colourful, playful, funny, well-drawn, cosy, PC, neo-liberal book about a comedy Satan and a cartoon evil future Catholic Church, in space. It’s not terrible, but it’s not really my thing. Lots of comic book readers will love it, and who am I to shoot it all down? I wish the creators all the luck in the world, and if you enjoy cute and cuddly comic books that come from the neo-liberal, progressive centre of what you are allowed to say in contemporary comedy, throw them a couple of quid, as I’m sure you’ll love it.


Rating: 5/10 (Politically correct neo-liberal consensus comedy book that features superior artwork)