(courtesy Aftershock Comics)
We live in age of apocalypse – not so much a literal one although the quickening march of climate change and increased geopolitical fractiousness may soon, alarmingly, change that – but a storytelling one with the hopefulness of the post-World War Two having long given up its hopeful place to a dark cynicism which sees only bleakness and destruction lining the future path of humanity.
There’s little poetry in that kind of assessment but in the introduction to We Live (Volume 1) by the Miranda Brothers – not actual brothers, per se, but creative ones with their bios jointly stating that “their natural imaginative creative impulses led them to join forces and create stories together … as if they were returning to that messy bedroom they shared as children” – this heart-wrenchingly beautiful and affecting story is set in the most poetical of contexts, even if it is tinged with considerable melancholy.
The apocalypse is not the end of life, but the end of a dream.
What comes after the apocalypse is a raw existence, a place where time and emotions exist in a new and constrained sense. The infinite soul wakes up one day inside a finite time, in a hopeless terrain. We then feel that there is only one way ahead of us, we recognize [sic] our own death, and we wait for it.
Reading this exquisitely moving introduction, you feel immediately as if someone, for the first time ever, has really nailed what it feels like to be caught in an apocalyptic environment where all the hopefulness and optimism that pushed humanity on and on to greater and ever more spectacular heights is no more.
Gone. Vanished. Lost.
And with it any sense we have of a better tomorrow and any feeling that living and not just surviving may be possible.
In We Live, which is its own optimistic titular declaration of enduring, we met Tala and Hototo, older sister and younger brother who are alone in a very strange world some 50 years into a diabolically different future.
In this twisted iteration of 2084, what the TV sitcom Community might readily tag as “the darkest timeline”, humanity is well and truly up against it.
(courtesy Aftershock Comics)
Beginning with the “hostile mutation”, “colossal hurricanes, Biblical floods, electromagnetic storms and earthquakes” then turned weather from a benign staple of the nightly news to catastrophic nightmares changed the face of the earth beyond recognition.
If that wasn’t bad enough, this terror was followed by strange beasts and genetic degenerations (including weird zombie-like nightmares; one bite and you’re toast) leaping from the whirlwind of sped up evolution with ecology seemingly rising up in its own peculiar revenge, war and astronomical deluge, all of which humanity somehow survived, though barely.
While humanity somewhat prevailed, organising itself into nine “mother megalopolises” with unprotected enduro villages hanging out on the margins, ninety percent of people had been lost and humanity was, by any measure, one disaster away from annihilation.
Which comes, in We Live, from aliens – yes, we scooped the full suite of apocalyptic nasties – which pronounce that they are ending us as a race but not before giving 5000 children the chance to be whisked to the stars and safety but only if they are wearing special bracelets which are parachuted onto a beleaguered Earth like Willy Wonka Golden Tickets in luminously lit-up pods.
So, there is still a chance but a wretched one with the rump of humanity consigned to the galactic dustbin of history; even so, hope is a curious thing, and somewhat corrupting with self-interest trumping any sense of collective coming together for species survivable (yup, even at the end we can fully entertain the better angels of our nature who are likely “molders” aka zombies anyway), and it spurs Tala and Hototo, who has one of the much sought-after bracelets, to get to the pick-up point and safety.
The imagination at work in We Live is truly impressive and hugely enthralling, brought to vividness of life by Inaki Miranda’s artwork which is a thing of truly remarkable beauty.
He realises a world of bleak loss and grief in tones that are almost technicolour but it fits a story in which hope and vivaciousness looking forward somehow persists in the face of endlessly violent reasons why it should simply take its existential bat & ball home and wait for the inevitable end to come.
(courtesy Aftershock Comics)
Tala and Hototos’ story is marked by epic amount of loss on a scale two children should not have to grapple with but through it all Tala persists because she has promised her mother she would, because she loves Hototo more than anything in the world and because she wants the magical world he believes in to be the one he gets to live in.
Hototo, who ends up on the arc to end all arcs – the ending is astoundingly clever and thoughtful and profoundly movingly imaginative and you will cry, laugh and gasp at the audacity of the narrative twist and the raw humanity on display – is, with Tala, the heart and soul of We Live which brings together words and art to devastatingly beautiful effect.
It is quite simply one of the most thoughtfully wrought tales of the apocalypse this reviewer has ever encountered and in the current overwhelming wave of end times tales that’s truly saying something because it takes to absolute heart what it means to love and be connected at a time when everything from alien species to genetically conjured up nightmares are actively working to tear the world and the people who still, against the odds, occupy it, apart.
We Live is a bold and fearless declaration, gorgeously realised in every way, that humanity can survive just about anything even as it judges us, and rightly, for an endless litany of sins for which we should we justifiably damned.
Anchored by artwork that will take your breathe away again and again and again, with even the most evil of things possess a compelling beauty that defies the horror we feel at their very existence, and a world that is nothing like our own but everything like it too, We Live is a beguilingly rich and immersive tale of what happens to people at the end of the world, how they manage to somehow summon hope and tenacity when any call for it seems cruelly lost, and how two young kids might just be the best thing to happen to the world even as it seemingly comes to a sad and very sorry, though luminously coloured, end.
We Live (Volume 1) is out now with Volume 2 releasing 1 August this year.