Reading Comics #86 "Noah By Any Other Name"

I've got a lot of obsessions.  One of them has less and less inadvertently become reading variations on Noah's Ark (Not Wanted On the Voyage, The Preservationist, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters).

I stumbled across Microcosm Publishing about a month ago and Box Brown's Everything Dies, which was a web comic subsequently collected in print editions by Microcosm.  Everything Dies #7, as you might guess, features a variation on Noah's Ark.

Now, as you may or may not know, the idea of a vast flood that wiped out all of civilization in ancient times was not unique to the Bible.  In fact, it seems to have been a common story of the Mesopotamian region, for instance depicted in the Epic of Gilgamesh as well, and therefore either based on an actual flood or simply a story several cultures really liked.

The account in Everything Dies #7 comes from Eridu and in many ways is a pretty standard origin-of-the-world story with archetype gods whose decision that humanity has become "too raucous" leads to the flood, the ark and a king named Ziasudra packing up animals into the ark in order to preserve a semblance of continuity.

Ziasudra plays a very minor role in Brown's account.  He basically functions.  It's the gods that carry this story, almost like how the gods play such an integral role in Homer's Iliad.

Brown is your fairly typical indy creator.  His art is very cartoonish and simple, which is not a bad thing.  In many ways, it suits his ambition to strip this version of Noah's Ark to its most essential elements.  Even in the biblical version, it can sometimes be hard to remember that God is a huge part of the story.  (In Not Wanted On the Voyage, he's an immortal, very old, very brittle passenger, one of several quirky individuals in the narrative.)