The Last Survivors Review

My introduction to J.R. "Bob" Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius was in the form of the book Revelation X, a copy of which my father had. The book was published in 1994, but I could swear I had read it while I was still in high school several years earlier. Weirdly, that discrepency somehow seems perfectly fitting. In any event, I did get what they were doing with the book but, at the time, I didn't realize it went beyond that one book. I mean, sure, there was an address to order other books from but I thought that itself was part of the joke. A fake address that annoyed a single postman in Cleveland Heights who had to regularly deal with the mail to this obviously phony address. It wasn't until several years later that I saw/heard of "Bob" again. I want to say from people making analogies to the Flying Spaghetti Monster in 2005 -- here again, that date feels years off from my memory but still it's fitting.

If you're not familiar with the Church of the SubGenius... well, that would take way too long for me to explain here. You're already online if you're reading this; look them up. Suffice it to say that in checking them out for the first time in many years, I discovered they put out a comic book last year. There was always a close adjacency between comics and the followers of "Bob" but I'd never seen an actual comic from them. This one came out last year and was written and drawn by AI. (Keeping with the SubGenius' "slack" theme!) I think every comic creator has been pretty aghast at the notion of AI doing comics but, based on my own experiments with AI, I was reasonably certain it wouldn't work. So how does an AI book look?

SubGenius founder Rev. Ivan Stang includes a pretty detailed explanation of how he put this comic together. He started by having ChatGPT write ten different scripts on how tardigrades and rotifers would survive after all other life on Earth perished. His analysis was "they all sucked." But he did like some of the ideas, and edited the best parts of all ten scripts together and then tweaked things to maintain verb tenses and such. He then used Wonder and Dream to do around fifty variantions of each panel, as he envisioned in his head. He selected what the pieces he felt came closest to what he wanted, and assembled everything together into a single document.

The story itself is pretty simplistic. In the aftermath human destroying all other life, the tardigrades and rotifers wind up in a war fighting over resources. The war lasted generations, decimating whatever was left, until there was only one of each creature left. The last tardigrade ate the last rotifer, and eventually died in the wasteland. But a new micro-organism began to flourish...

That's the whole story. It's simple, but honestly not told all that well. It could very much use more of a "show, don't tell" approach as it's very heavy on using caption boxes to convey most of the action. The art does work with it, and there's even dialogue, but most of the art is more atmospheric than descriptive. And (as should surprise none of you if you've ever used an AI art tool) the designs of the creatures shifts from panel to panel. You can still clearly identify which are tardigrades and which are rotifers, but mostly only because they're so broadly different to begin with.

If you look at it from the standpoint of comics as a medium, it doesn't do much. Pretty much any new stuff at your local comic shop this week will be a better example of the medium. The story itself feels pretty reminiscent of the original EC comics with the classic "twist" endings (heck, even the overall story length is comparable!) but the art isn't as engaging despite being technically rendered better.

I think the book will amuse and entertain folks who already have an interest/affinity for the Church of the SubGenius; the artifactness of a comic not actually written or drawn by anyone. It might interest folks who want to study directly the specifics of how the AI handled different aspects of its execution. For as much as "Bob" does inform/enlighten/entertain/distract me personally, though, I'd be hard-pressed to recommend it to anyone else. But if you are game to try, The Last Survivors is available through the SubGenius website for $15 US. And that does come with each copy personalized to you and autographed by Rev. Ivan Stang himself! "To dull the pain of existence in a world without slack."

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