(courtesy Simon & Schuster)
Apocalypses are, even by the sound of the word, loveless, thankless, dark and ugly affairs.
That makes sense – aliens/zombies/nuclear-crazed warmongers or climate change-stoking fossil fuel addicts have ended the world and with it, all the things we loved and that made the ugly hand of reality not feel quite so oppressive.
In times as dark as the end of civilisation, there’s little to be had beyond the uninspiring grind of sheer survival so when a graphic novel such as Once Upon a Time at the End of the World – Book one: Love in the Wasteland by Jason Aaron (writer), Alexndre Tefenkgi (artist) and Lee Loughridge (colourist) comes along, it captures your attention simply because it dares to posit the intoxicating idea that maybe something more than putting one foot in front of the other and staying in love is possible in an apocalypse.
To be fair, it’s careful to admit that if love does bloom in times as dark as this that it is really up against it and that any successful blooming of romance in the most twisted of rom-com premised situations is going to have to work hard to make its way above distrust, fury and the emotional distancing needed to survive oblivion and trauma.
But even with at least of the characters in this evocatively and playfully named story keeping her guard as long as humanly possible, love, to completely misquote Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, does find a way.
But good lord, does it have to work for it!
In a future filled with junk, environmental devastation, psycho far-right religious cults and mutants – quite what has gone down isn’t clear but it isn’t pretty and it’s best avoided if we can manage it (don’t hold your breath) – a strangely upbeat young man named Maceo lives in a sealed-off tower filled with a book pool (yep an empty swimming place filled with works of literature), a safe room full of pillows and a room where the whiz-kid genius invents things.
If there’s such a thing as an ideal home in the apocalypse, Maceo has it but he is alone, and though you see him talking to his parents, you never actually see them (until you do and well, hold your heart close lest it be ripped in two) and so, when he spots a feisty young woman losing a battle with what can best be described as big-mouthed mutant octopi, he quickly gives her sanctuary in his building.
It’s a very human act but one that changes everything for both Maceo and Ezmerelda aka Mezzy as she prefers to be known who find themselves in short order on the road, mainly because when Mezzy decides she needs to keep running from the Boy Scout cultists on her tail, Maceo can’t bear to be left behind now he actually understands how lonely he actually is.
Thus begins an adventure without parallel for either person.
At first, and for a good while afterwards, Mezzy doesn’t want Maceo anywhere near her, not only because he’s brought an impractical amount of gait-shuddering supplies with him – including a rat-powered TV to watch VHS cartoons on, just one of the heartfelt, inner child quirks that make Maceo, and thus, Once Upon a Time at the End of the World so endearing – but because he continues to believe that life is wondrous and exciting and possible, even though Mezzy, nursing grief and profound loss, knows it is anything but.
But then Maceo wises up and Mezzy realises connection to somewhere new may not be so bad, and they meet somewhere in the relational middle, two people discovering that just because the world has ended, it doesn’t mean some of the finer points of humanity have to as well.
It’s not necessarily a happy-ever-after, as some forward jumps in the storyline make clear, but it’s a remarkable thing nonetheless because it says that even in the face of so many dark things, light and lovely things, the kind that can enrich the spirit and turn survival into actual living, are achievable.
It fills Once Upon a Time at the End of the World with a buoyancy and hopefulness that proves to be quite powerful even in the face of real horror, sadness and torturously ugly events, and which comes alive through artwork that makes the already affecting story have even more of an impact.
Tefenkgi’s art is vivid and expansive, a mix of colours bright and subdued that depending on the way augments and emphasises to a sometimes soul-shattering degree what a battle it is to be alive in an age that is actively trying to end you in a variety of relentlessly terrible ways.
It brings Aaron’s deftly-used dialogue and narrative richness alive to such an extent that you are enveloped in the broken world they inhabit and the dark things they experience and nightmarish beings they encounter and are reassured even in the worst of it that love, real muscular love (not the kind that lives in light and airy verses in greeting cards) can actually stare down even an apocalypse.
If that sounds fanciful to you, then prepare to be reminded about how much the human spirit can endure and how even in the very worst of times, and the world of Once Upon a Time at the End of the World is decidedly that and then some, wonderful, beautiful things can happen and the raw emotion of simply surviving can become something altogether transcendantly uplifting wonderful.
It’s rare to get to the end of an apocalyptic story and feel a burst of hopefulness radiate through you and to feel enlivened by possibility and the sheer loveliness of being alive, but that happens with Once Upon a Time at the End of the World which celebrates how all kinds of things may end but the human spirit doesn’t, and that it’s so powerful, in fact, that one young man and one young woman can find each other, transform each other’s blighted lives and go forward into a future that may actually hold some promise to it, after all.