Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell by Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan

It's weird how a serialized story turns into something different in collected form. Obviously, it was structured to be read in snippets, day by day, over time. Getting a big clump of it all at once - as much as, in this case, all of it - turns all of those pauses vastly smaller, everything that had to stand for a day or a week or a month into a bare second as the reader turns the page.

I suppose there are examples where it damages the work, where there's a lot of Shocking Reveals and Unfulfilled Cliffhangers and other things that just become tedious when all read together. But the things that come to my mind are all cases where the continuity makes the story work better, where it's easier to keep characters and relationships and world-building in your mind as you go, since it hasn't been (in this case) four and a half years since the beginning.

Not to bury the lede with that meandering: Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell was a webcomic, appearing from the beginning of 2009 through mid-2013. It turned into this book in 2014. It was written and drawn by Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan. (I gather Goldstein is the cartoonist, so she did most of the art and maybe more scripting, but there's a style of repeating strip drawn by Jordan, the medieval historian, so it's pretty clear they both did some level of All The Things creating this story.)

It's a contemporary fantasy, of the "everything is true" sub-variety - Darwin is our main character, a mid-twenties guy in a NYC that's also home to a bewildering array of mythological and fantastic creatures. For examples: his landlord is a minotaur, his pet/friend Skittles is a manticore, and three stoner angels have been crashing on his couch for far too long.

Darwin, some years ago (during his late teenage years) in a sequence of events we eventually see, acquired an overwhelming karmic debt, one that he's unlikely to ever be able to overcome in his life. He's, as the title says, doomed to hell, and all of the creatures that can see karmic auras - which is a lot of them, including more "normal people" than you might expect - can see and be at least mildly taken aback by his metaphysical cloud of absolute gloom.

That's the set-up: Darwin Carmichael is mostly a thing of short continuities for the first half, exploring its world and fleshing out Darwin's connections to other people (most importantly Ella, his best friend, whose karma is as good as his is bad, and for pretty much an equally not-her-responsibility reason). There are a couple of large-ish adventures, where Darwin falls in love briefly with a Snow Queen and Ella is transformed into a cat, plus a mythology-related trip to see the Dalai Lama - but, overall, it feels more like an ongoing series than something with a clear through-line.

But Goldstein and Jordan switched gears in the last six months or so of the strip, with a big apocalypse storyline that incorporated nearly every character still alive and active in a literal battle to the death between good and evil. (And let me note here that Darwin, because of that karmic debt, is firmly placed by said supernatural forces on the evil side of the battle.)

It ends well, which most webcomics don't. I mean, most webcomics peter out or just stop suddenly - Darwin both has a real ending and does it well, which is doubly impressive. Even a decade later, this is a great example of telling a story using the rhythms of serialization but making it something that works well as a single story in the end.

And Goldstein's art is great here: fat rounded lines, great faces, crisp colors, cartoony in all the best ways. (Jordan's style is fun and works for the bits she does, too.)

The website is still mostly live, though the comics are down at the moment ("moment" here meaning "since 2022"), and it's old enough that it'll throw a scary "not secure" error in most modern browsers. The book is semi-available from random third-party sellers. Or you can be like me and hope to come across a copy of the book in the wild: it did work in my case, though it took nine years.