I was only one of two people who said you should buy the first issue of Zenescope’s No Tomorrow #1, and after reading issue #2 I can say it’s still worth following. After reading some of my fellow Bastards’ opinions, I can see why they had some issues with the first installment of this miniseries. However, I feel that these problems were resolved pretty well in this book. There’s no random family at the beginning that doesn’t have anything to do with the actual plot of the story. Keres is also more adamant on getting to Patrick this time, as it may have seemed she was a bit passive when we first saw her for being the goddess of death. The book starts out with Keres walking through different scenarios where there were many deaths. These include The Black Death, The Spanish Flu, and Smallpox. These scenes reminded me of the first time I read Grimm Fairy Tales, in issue #88. Keres assuring herself that nobody can escape death while people are dead in the streets or in their own home with blood coming out of their mouths is pretty creepy. It seems as if she’s trying to build herself up because she knows she made a mistake in not killing Patrick the first time. She ends up in present-day Central Park, where a disgruntled man named Oliver sits next to her on a park bench. She’s in her ‘human’ form I guess you could call it now, not the goddess of death as we know her as. While he’s telling her about how his wife left him and took his kids, she vanishes. Oliver is still talking to himself; he says he’ll prove everybody wrong. Keres returns in her true form and agrees that Oliver will “show them all.”
We then return to Chicago, where our main protagonist Patrick is getting out of an ambulance. He’s the only one that survived the collapse of his work building, and Keres is standing on a gargoyle of a nearby building. She could have easily killed him here, but she tosses the gargoyle conveniently as he’s walking away. This was one of my least favorite parts of the book, it didn’t seem necessary. A similar botched murder attempt occurs right after Patrick is leaving the hospital with his wife. We see Keres standing in the hallway, and a bucket of water is spilled in the hallway. I’m guessing she hopes he would slip and break his neck?
Luckily, there are some redeeming factors throughout the rest of the story that more than make up for these missteps. Patrick is starting to go crazy. Every channel he flips to, there’s another tragedy on the news. He realizes Keres is in every single frame on the TV too. She’s not in her true form, but when Patrick pauses the TV, she turns into Keres and starts having a conversation with him. She says she’s going to kill his whole family and him. She calls him, is talking to him on the TV, and when he unplugs those and smashes the phone, she appears on his laptop. Any electronic device lights up with her picture on it, and every phone in the neighborhood goes off to get her message across.
Patrick’s son Corey comes home during his meltdown, and says that he signed up for a field trip of Corey’s. Patrick gets there and to his dismay, it’s a death exhibit. He doesn’t remember signing up for it, but Corey assures him he did, because death is ‘cool.’ Obviously, Patrick doesn’t think that anymore. He goes into the “Goddess of Death” exhibit and finds out how Keres works. Her name means “she who will not be seen” in Latin. If you look at her in her true form, she will come after you and kill you. So this is why she’s been hunting Patrick down since he saw her that day in Chicago. Patrick is incredibly flustered to find this out and leaves the museum. He lets Corey stay behind with a group of friends. There’s a girl named Randi who’s driving while Corey and his friends are out, and she gets a text from Keres saying “You might want to look up.” I won’t give away what happens there, but at the end we do see Oliver’s destruction in Central Park.
In my opinion, this was a solid book. It wasn’t anything extraordinary, but it is definitely interesting enough to get you to want to find out what happens. At points it may seem a bit drawn out since Keres is extremely powerful yet you wonder how she hasn’t killed Patrick yet. Her plans are starting to unfold, so I’m curious to see who kicks the bucket next month.
Score: 3/5
Writer: Raven Gregory Artist: Luca Claretti Publisher: Zenescope Entertainment Price: $3.99 Release Date: 9/25/13