(courtesy Image Comics)
On the surface, the idea of a genie appearing before each and every one of the people currently alive on Earth and offering them one wish would be something miraculous and full of wondrous possibility.
Think of the things that could be righted – world hunger, climate hunger, war, pestilence and disease … the list goes on and on, and if the wishes were used wisely then what manner of perfect paradise would come into being?
But there’s the clincher in that last phrase – “used wisely”; have you seen the state of the world lately? Been on social media? Watched the type of people pushing for continued use of oil or voicing support for actual or incipient dictators? Seen what passes for discourse in certain toxic quarters of fandom?
The creators of Eight Billion Genies, Charles Soule and Ryan Browne have, and they know that what would result is not the hoped-for paradise but an Alice in Wonderland-meets-your very worst nightmare of wishes used in the most impetuous and darkly mischievous and often quite cruel ways.
Turns out, and no surprise news headline here, that left to their own devices, that humanity would wish for very dumb sh*t, and while some calmer, more thoughtful hearts and minds would use their wishes selflessly and with an eye to the betterment of those beyond themselves, a great many others would not, and you’d be left with a world in absolute, death-spiralling chaos.
Except for one small bar, The Lampwick Bar and Grill in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, where the owner ———- SPOILER AHEAD !!!!! ———- would near instantly wish that any wishes made inside or outside the bar would have no effect on the bar itself or those inside it.
Smart thinking, and quite miraculously selfless, and while the world goes quite literally to hell in a T-Rex carried, vampiric basket, that one bar becomes a bastion of safety, security and family, and eventually, where everyone comes to a quite surprisingly magical but deeply human conclusion.
It’s well nigh impossible to say much more without giving away the whole imaginatively superlative plot but suffice to say that Eight Billion Genies is one of the best, most creative and socially conscious but fun stories to come down the pike in quite some time.
(courtesy Image Comics)
Granted, this bundle of eight clever stories and perfectly in-sync artwork has been around for a couple of years now since its release in 2022, and was doubtless conceived before the full effects of the COVID pandemic were fully appreciated, but if you ever wanted a thoughtful projection of what might happen at the end of the world if humanity were its chief, not so much architect because that lies rather cleverly with the genies who are gods of a sort, plunger of the knife, then Eight Billion Genies is most certainly it.
It is alarming and thrillingly tension-filled, and witty and clever and fun, all while masterfully postulating what the gift of one world-changing wish would do to a fractious people who have proved themselves eminently able of screwing things up without the aid of some playfully-doled out magicality.
Put simply, you will fly through Eight Billion Genies because it has the lot – arresting, emotionally honest and fully-formed characters, power politics and the worst and best part of human nature, a story that goes way out there and actually delivers in absolute spades and the artwork to bring it vivaciously to life which actually ends up being every bit as perilous construct as you might imagine.
Each issue comes with a countdown clock of the number of people left alive, and genies left attending them, and this fast-dropping set of figures, possibly more than anything else in this wild ride of a graphic novel, illustrates just how much of a danger we are to ourselves and how much damage we can do to the human collective in a very short period of time.
Forget giving everyone a vote, a scarily democratic knife hovering over the body human; what we should fear most is what might happen if everyone could manifest their deepest, darkest, most twisted or laudable longings (far more of the former than the latter, alas) and all the architects, the genies, of this mayhem would do, is comment sagely on what’s going on.
It is riotously, astoundingly good, with Browne’s artwork, which brings the new world and the genies who expressively watch it come to pass to life, wildly, colourfully and evocatively alive, and Soule’s nuanced but out-there writing working in perfect damningly funny lockstep.
Eight Billion Genies is a hugely entertaining but incredibly unnerving thrill ride that reminds me we are but eight billion dumb decisions away from the end of the world, and all it would take is someone giving people the means for superpower-wielding, sentient freeway, fiery gigantism to result.
Eight Billion Genies is available from Image Comics.
(courtesy Image Comics)