Written by Jim Munroe, with gorgeous illustrations by Shannon Gerard, Sword of My Mouth is about how single mother Ella tries to deal with a world in the grips of something like the Rapture. We already learned in the previous series that we're not exactly dealing with Bible stuff here: People are transforming into creatures who reflect their belief systems. So many people in America are Christian that signs of the apocalypse are everywhere, but aren't leading where you'd expect. Christian believers who Raptured floated up into space, where they hung in orbit and died. And pagans - who are among Munroe's heroes - are turning into half-animals while witches clip wires to their bodies to become internet nodes.

In a Detroit divided between people who still believe they'll be claimed by God, and those who are trying to make it on Earth, Ella's partner has abandoned her and their newborn. When her apartment burns down, she moves in with a group of anarchist urban farmers - some of them part-animal - to begin life again. Making things even more complicated is that fact that her baby is a post-Rapture birth, and his mouth shows a mysterious mark that makes it obvious he isn't quite human.

Meanwhile, a shady figure with skeleton hands is cruising around in a chauffered car, looking for . . . something. And angels continue to murder people. The war for Earth, in other words, goes on. But Munroe never forgets that every war is a web of small stories that belong to ordinary people as well as the Big Bads.

Gerard's illustrations suit the mood of this new series perfectly. There's a kind of sweetness to her drawings of Ella and the anarchists, highlighted by the 1970s feeling to the drawings as well as her tiny, crumbling lettering. But when the darker characters' storylines emerge, the spareness of her drawing lends itself well to gooey shadows and skeletons.

If you love tales of the apocalypse but want something smarter and more character-driven than the upcoming movie Legion, you must read this comic.

Munroe will be posting new issues of the comic on a regular basis, and the first two issues are already available for just $1 each on his website.

Munroe is one of my very favorite scifi writers — he's the creator of the nanopunk film Infest Wisely (free online!), as well as the author of Everyone in Silico, Flyboy Action Figure Comes with Gasmask (free online!), and An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil, the prequel to Therefore Repent! This is his first foray into comics, and he takes to the medium well.

We meet Mummy and Raven, a couple of artists who used to do an act where they dressed up as a mummy and a raven, as they are searching for a home in a world turned upsidown by the rapture of hundreds of thousands of Christians. Those left behind are divided between "splitters," people who are trying to go as Christian as possible so they'll be taken up during the Apocalypse (this includes George W. Bush), and people who are happy to live in a world free from Christians. Mummy and Raven are among the latter, and they've moved into a cozy squat left abandoned by its raptured inhabitants. Things start to get even more unhinged, however, when angels in military uniforms start machine gunning "sinners," and dogs start to talk. Plus, ordinary people are starting to develop weird magical powers — one woman can send email by attaching ethernet cables to her piercings, and Raven herself can create birds out of smoke.

As the wiccans, lesbians, and punks start to band together to fight the paramilitary angels, Raven and Mummy start to have relationship difficulties. Mummy is flirting with the cute indie rock girl at the bar down the street, and Raven is keeping her feelings so bottled up that she's become psychologically stuck. This is the great thing about Munroe's writing, always: he manages to write weirdly sweet romantic stories set against a backdrop of the apocalypse or some kind of huge technological emergency. Salgood's drawings manage to be both dark and funny, cute sketches that shade into shadowy gloom, which perfectly harmonizes with the mood of the narrative.

There's a terrifically great twist ending which despite my love of spoilers I won't give away. Suffice to say, the story stays consistently surprising and weird, and the message is never a simple "Christianity is stupid" dogma at all. Instead, the point is to be careful about what kind of paradise you wish for. You just might get it.

You can buy all of Munroe's books, including Therefore Repent, here.

Munroe says:

When I think about the dynamics of politics and science fiction, my
favourite case study is Orwell's 1984 . . . Instead of a totally plausible story, Orwell gave us the phrase "big brother", which was a cultural inoculation against intrusive technologies. Not to say it was 100% effective, but can you imagine what the world would look like now if all we didn't have a suitably foreboding term? Warning people about "interconnected databases" just wouldn't have the same effect as invoking Big Brother. Orwell could have produced a book that was more believable, if you look at his subtler and more nuanced works, but I think he intended this to be a political act rather than an artistic work . . . Naming, as our fantasy brethren tell us, has Power. (Or at least, frames a starting point for a discussion.) I don't think there's many policy-makers coming out of a SF movie with bold new plans for America.

If you haven't seen Munroe's nanopunk movie Infest Wisely, check it out. It's free!