#264 Reading (and Writing) Comics for Catharsis: Scott Snyder’s AD: After Death

When Scott Snyder, a fan (and personal) favorite author announced way back in 2015 that he would be working with Canadian great Jeff Lemire to write After Death, I was very excited – we’ve written on Lemire several times and no doubt will again (I’m calling dibs on his work with Gord Downie on Secret Path), but since Snyder is normally confined to the superhero genre he doesn’t get as much academic acknowledgement as he’s worth. His work on Batman recently, however, has garnered some much deserved critical acclaim, with Endgame as a standout that can be held up as an equal to some of the best stories any author, even Miller and Morrison, have written into the character since his inception. He’s currently penning the newly launched All Star Batman even though he’s been finished his work on the main series for several months now. Lemire is also currently working in the superhero genre with Old Man Logan, connected to the recent movie only at the loosest level, and individually they provide the most thoughtful comics the big two publishers have on the shelves. Together, filling out what Snyder promised to be a very personally inspired piece contained within a very short, three volume miniseries, I had great expectations and, as of right now being two issues in, even these have been surpassed by far. And it’s a testament to the series that even though it’s missing the concluding issue, as of this writing it appears that Sony has just optioned it for a feature film.

That said, before even getting even to content, being a print culture guy I have to first draw attention just to the physicality of the book. Choosing to publish through Image, the creative control over even the format of the series is at once evident. These aren’t comics in the traditional sense, or even your typical prestige format: being magazine sized, free from distracting advertisement, bound in heavy waffle cardstock with Lemire’s signature watercolours on rich, glossy paper, the series wants you to know it’s aiming for the unconventional. The spines and covers are free from branding, and unlike other graphic novels Snyder doesn’t even provide a précis on the back – you have to know what you’re getting into before you buy these, as the bulky awkwardness of them makes them difficult to display for comic shops and not really the right product for a magazine shop either which then makes direct ordering, months in advance, nearly the reader’s only option for acquiring a copy. With Image providing total production control to Snyder and Lemire, you almost have to wonder if the format and delivery choices are intentionally restrictive, designed predominantly for fans of their creators’ work rather than causal interlopers.

This reading of the format makes particular sense given the series’ themes. After Death follows in the growing tradition of post-apocalyptic stories in which we as a species are provided (through dubious science) with immortality, and normally with disastrous results. On the surface, there are two parallel narratives that run throughout After Death, the first being the narrator’s backstory and how immortality was offered to him and a select few others while the rest of the world was destroyed by a chemical plague. This portion of the text is delivered in prose, much like a traditional novel, with the odd accompanying image from Lemire. The second story is the present tense narrative wherein the protagonist is searching what we suspect is a barren Earth for others who survived catastrophe, and it’s delivered in traditional comic book format with very sparse dialogue, highlighting Lemire’s talents and showing a real give and take between the two contributors. The plot, however, is a bit of misdirection as we can glean from interviews with Snyder regarding the story, where he’s been surprisingly candid in his “tremendous fear of death and [has] struggled at times with depression and anxiety” (geekdad.com). The real core of After Death is Snyder’s coming to terms with obsessively ruminating on his own mortality, something that has haunted him from his youth and which he can’t shake even in moments of joy – perhaps even particularly in moments of joy, as in these we recognize the pain of the loss of all our moments more deeply. In trying to examine this fear, he offers a deftly wrought metaphor life being tantamount to a family skating on a lake, with the freezing water omnipresent underneath, and trying to avoid thinking about this fact is, for him, impossible. He “can’t stop it. Because some part of you refuses to ignore what’s beneath, to ignore the fact that at some point – maybe in seconds, maybe in weeks, maybe years if it stays cold and you’re lucky – but sometime in the forseeable future the ice will give way to the cold, black water below it. And, one by one, your friends, your family, and you, will all fall in. Shut up, you think, as you spin across the ice, laughing. SHUT UP” (A.D. Book One, 37). After Death is a vehicle for these haunting, explorative gazes into the abyss, what Snyder calls “the shadow at the edge of things” (38), something that he is more capable of accomplishing with a narrator whose immortality provides an alternate perspective on them. As we are only really allowed an understanding of a concept when we’re sufficiently removed from it (be it an era in literature, a war or any social movement), so is Snyder allowed similar reflections – by writing death out of his narrator, he interestingly writes into him an ability to access concepts that are otherwise unreachable.

The narrator in A.D., Cooke (a clear nod to Snyder’s friend comic artist Darwyn Cooke who recently passed away at an early age) is a professional thief – of objects and of time, as he discovers in the poetic logic of his predisposition for theft at an early age. He understands that as he steals, he is displacing objects from their current trajectories, creating his own reality for them wherein he can protect them (I’m reminded of my own comic collecting here). In a particularly memorable passage to this point, on stealing a painting from a wealthy man’s beach house, he realizes that he is “removing it from the rules of its life, like taking a word out of a paragraph without anyone knowing … it was about secretly recording my life; the theft was about squirreling away precious moments, hiding them from the slide of time, or slide of memory, keeping them safe under my bed from the math of the universe” (A.D. Book Two, 21). For Cooke, as for Snyder, containment whether in terms of theft, collecting, even writing, is about attempting to undo the horrific, inescapable logic of death and decay that he sees in all physical objects, from “the sickening way the cellophane peels off your sandwich” to “the shattered vein on your teacher’s calf” to “the scuffed nose of your action figure” (Book One, 38). This is really what we all do, trying to rationalize and organize our worlds against decay and death, creating in ourselves and our amassed things a structure out of chaos in resistance, sometimes quietly and sometimes in rage, against the dying of our light.

Sure, After Death is clearly part wish fulfilment on the part of Snyder, who crafts in his narrator a way to move beyond his own fears by writing death out of his characters in this sci-fi, pseudo-autobiography – as the old adage goes, being a writer is like living many lives. This pursuit of catharsis, when read in conjunction with Snyder’s interviews, hangs heavy on the text and can at times be a little cloying despite all its beautifully wrought prose and innovation. But because of these qualities, After Death shows us quite handily the transformative power of literature in being able to seek out connections with one another and challenge our fears by objectifying them – much like the thief, Snyder has stolen his own fears, removed them from the context of weighty albatross that has hung from around his neck since he was a boy, and formulated them in a new environment where they can be probed, discussed and maybe, just maybe, dealt with so as not to infect every moment of joy that life has to offer.

Works Cited

Snyder, Scott and Jeff Lemire. A.D. After Death: Book One. Image Comics, 2016.

Snyder, Scott and Jeff Lemire. A.D. After Death: Book Two. Image Comics, 2016.

Goldfield, Ray. “Interview with Scott Snyder – AD: After Death.” Geekdad.com, 23 November 2017, https://geekdad.com/2016/11/interview-with-scott-snyder-ad-after-death/.