We Only Find Them When They're Dead 1

 
 
We Only Find Them When They're Dead 1

The Seeker

by Al Ewing

art by Simone Di Meo

Boom! Studios

2021

 

 

We Only Find Them When They're Dead is a scifi comic about the crew of an 'autopsy ship,' one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, that works to mine resources from the corpses of dead gods. 

 
The gods are the size of Galactus, but dressed more like Thor and Loki. They're found floating in deep space at the very edge of the galactic rim, and, as the title indicates, they are always found dead. The autopsy ships are specialized mining vessels, little bigger than houseflies compared to the gods. They harvest meat, metal, and other valuable substances from the giant corpses.

 
The crew we follow has a plan to go deeper into space, into the void between galaxies, to try to find a god that's still alive. They're pursued by a policewoman with a longstanding personal grudge against the autopsy ship's captain. Their confrontation comes to a head on the body of a dying god. In the end, the captain goes even further alone, and on the last few pages, makes a very surprising discovery about the gods' origin.

 
Both the strangeness of the premise and the way the plot unfolds reminds me a lot of an episode of The Twilight Zone. The art is all digital painting, and makes use of full-page images and two-page spreads to help convey the enormity of the dead gods. The glimpses we see of the 'autopsies' are grotesque, and the whole situation implies something really macabre about the unseen human civilization that sends all these spaceships out to mine the corpses of transcendent beings.