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“You breathe… you live… you exist because we wish it. The Cosmic Fetus Collective… a pure beginning in hivemind fashion. Set aside your perceptions for now… this broken-down thing calls out for Quark level repairs! There is a stench about him… fear of the unknown…”

“Three distinct constructs of alien energy, rocketing through the curvature of space and time…they have direction… the have purpose… and their target– Where else? The new epicenter of universal happenstance… the third plant from Sol… Earth!”

“This crude fiber-optic artery will provide a direct channel into the technological underbelly of this rock! All her tragic secrets revealed! Observe, Supra… flaccid like a Vegan tropospheric serpent…”

One would think, reading the above excerpts, that Gødland was written long ago, or by someone far out of touch with modern sensibilities. The comic book market is increasingly dominated by stories chaining themselves to the rock of reality. People must appear real. Dialog must sound real, or whatever the cinematic equivalent of that is. Even fantasy is frequently couched on the idea of being more real than ever before. But Joe Casey and Tom Scioli remember a time when comics were not as far from reality as could be.

Reading some of those same comics today doesn’t really produce the same effect as it once did. Unfortunately, the ravages of time and cultural standards have ripped many of the mind-blowing cosmic stories of Jack Kirby of their full impact. The artistry is still there. The craft is evident, but to many readers, the anachronistic elements are often too much to get past.

This is where Gødland fits in. Until now, no one has been able to replicate the feel of those comics without coming off as lesser imitations, full of loving tribute, but lacking anything original. Gødland contains the best of its predecessors, but amazingly, inexplicably, it doesn’t come off as a book out of time. It’s a modern comic book, with one foot in the past, but facing forward. Personally, it took me a while to get past this concept, because I really don’t go for nostalgia books. Of course, this turned out to be my mistake, because to call Gødland intentional nostalgia is doing the creative team a great disservice. This book is something new, and something old at the same time.

Gødland is, in the most basic sense, a superhero comic book. Adam Archer is an astronaut who crashed on Mars, and is the final survivor of his crew. He is discovered by the Cosmic Fetus Collective, and is imbued with great cosmic powers, the extent of which he has no clue.

Did you notice that I said “Cosmic Fetus Collective?” That would be the third time the term has popped up on this page. This is exactly the kind of concept that sounds both old and new. King Kirby would never have used the word fetus, but here it is, in its ridiculous glory, daring the reader to take it seriously.

Archer returns to earth, and along with his 3 sisters, sets up shop in the middle of Manhattan in a big, kooky looking tower, looking out for America on behalf of the government. People don’t know much about Archer yet, and they’re not really too keen on him so far. Very soon, he meets and befriends a giant alien doglike creature, Maxim, who’s been sent to help Archer understand his true purpose. In the course of the first 12 issues, we are introduced to all manner of threats, which is where, for me, the book really started to become a whole heap of fun.

You flip to the last page of the first issue and you meet Basil Cronus. Basically, Basil is a decomposing head, floating in a half full glass tank atop the shoulders of a robot body. Think of the preserved heads from Futurama if they weren’t bolted down in the tank, but floating freely. A quick glance reveals what would be a fairly standard supervillain from comics of the 60’s. Closer inspection, mostly the bobbing head thing, reveals something just a little off. As you learn more about the character later issues, you find out that he’s not out for world domination so much as out for a really killer high. He just wants to get good and messed up using whatever mind expanding substances he can come up with. For me, it was this first bit of oddity which told me I was dealing with something that was more than it seemed.

There’s also bigness to be taken into account, or big-osity, or perhaps even big-itude. I’ve mentioned how comics, no matter how far fetched they start out, are continually being taken to street level. But the fact is, as appealing as that sounds, not every book can or should be based on Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Batman: Year One. Some titles belong way off the street. Gødland will have nothing to do with the street, and I find this exceptionally refreshing. The concepts and scope of Gødland is big in the way that the universe is big. There are huge alien machines of war the size of mountains putting the island of Manhattan in grave danger. Gods responsible for all life in the universe are behind the scenes of this story, and it’s no mere chemical spill or experiment gone wrong that leads to Adam Archer’s power. There’s a sense of grandiosity to Gødland and it’s almost so unfamiliar to me that I don’t know what I’m looking at. There was a time when this was actually commonplace in comics, but I’m pretty sure that was before I was alive. There’s a little bit of “it’s so old it’s new” going on with this, but it’s doing it in a new way. It’s a big new way.

I think I’ve finally sorted out what Joe Casey might be best at. He exists to do a job that no one else is comics can do. He brings the past into the present. He takes the old, and his appreciation for what came before, and when he takes his pass on those concepts, you end up with something that didn’t exist before. It’s a perspective on the kinds of stories done in prior comic book epochs that we’ve never seen. More impressively, he seems to be able to do it with any era in comics. I’m looking at Gødland, and I see a modern take on comics using a formula very like comics from the 1960’s. More recently, with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Casey followed this route, showing us another way to look at Avengers comics from the 1980’s. My favorite of his work, Wildcats, showed me that something could even be done with characters from the 1990’s Image boom, and that I would actually care about it. He took those characters who were largely about straps and posing, and placed them in a sort of post-superhero role. This is what Joe Casey does. He makes me care about things that I just wouldn’t otherwise. Read me the pitches for any of these projects on paper, and I don’t go and buy them. They come out of Casey’s pen, and I just know, deep down, that he’s trying to get at something I’m going to find compelling, but combining the wisdom of multiple ages of comics.

Before build my Joe Casey shrine too high, it must be stated that the other person responsible for this A) doesn’t perpetually wear sunglasses in public and B) is perhaps the only artist I could possibly imagine making this book work. I had never heard of Tom Scioli prior to Gødland. Apparently, he won a Xeric Grant in 1999 for writing and drawing The Myth of 8-Opus, and he’s generally known for unabashedly working in Jack Kirby’s style. I say, if you’re gonna do someone’s thing, Kirby ain’t a bad guy’s to be doing. This book feels like a comic book. I know that comes off as being a ridiculous statement, but how many other books are there out there that aren’t trying to simulate something else? A lot of titles try to be cinematic, or behave like serialized television, or like a video game. Gødland feels like a comic book. It doesn’t feel like anything else. I loved just looking at every page in here. This stuff is gleefully two dimensional, except for the hugely satisfying dynamic foreshortening. His use of foreground and background illustrates exactly what was so electric about Kirby’s style. There’s all this great black ink on the page, and all the hands and feet have a tremendous weight. Every pose is dramatic, and there’s almost nothing naturalistic about it. It’s everything that was once great and unique about comic books. While my words might sound like hyperbole, just go and look at these pages, and tell me they don’t make you want to describe them like Stan Lee would have in 1963. The whole world here is hyperbole. I defy you to find a better guy than Tom Scioli to be drawing this book. It just isn’t going to happen.

Gødland is the solution to a problem I didn’t know I had. I was getting what I thought I wanted out of comics. But what I’ve been missing, much to my own chagrin, is the fantastic. I’ve been missing the big. Gødland brings the big. It’s right there in the title. Take a look at the hardcover Celestial Edition. It’s big. The concepts inside are big. The image on the cover is big. And if I know Joe Casey, the intention and love being put into this are enormous. In this case, the big leads to the fun, which is certainly what I found in Gødland.

Josh Flanagan
My god… the pages…
josh@ifanboy.com