Book-A-Day 2018 #171: Demon by Jason Shiga (4 volumes)

When religious people talk about the dangers of pure scientism, they're talking about Jimmy Yee. Maybe a bit about his creator, Jason Shiga, too.

But Yee is the poster boy for why believing in only what you can prove is really, really bad: he murders an appreciable fraction of the entire human race during this story, mostly because he sees no reason not to. And the only possible ethical justification is that, most of the time, he's only killing himself.

Without getting into the traditional arguments against suicide, I think we can all agree that killing yourself is at the very least generally less bad than killing someone else. But what if every time you kill yourself, you also kill someone else by taking over their body?

Demon is a very Jason Shiga comic, which is to say it takes a particular premise and then inexorably rolls out all of the entirely logical consequences of that that premise, leaving human feeling (except for a certain glee in destruction and mayhem) entirely out of the equation. The worldview here is a kind of happy nihilism: nothing matters, everything is disposable, and that's wonderful for our viewpoint character.

Or, to put it another way: Demon is Miracleman #15 from the viewpoint of Kid Miracleman, going on for several hundred years.

Actually, that's another thing that's annoyingly cartoony about Demon: it goes on for well over two hundred years, but society and technology don't change in the slightest. Oops, that might be a spoiler.

I should probably explain all of those disjointed thoughts.

OK. This long, multi-volume graphic novel [1] opens with Jimmy Yee, in a cheap motel room. He hangs himself. He wakes up in bed in the same cheap motel room, and slits his wrists in the bathtub.

And wakes up in the same cheap motel room. And kills himself with the gun he finds in a drawer.

And wakes up in the same cheap motel room. And takes an overdose of pills.

And wakes up in the same cheap motel room. And runs out into traffic to be hit by a semi.

And wakes up in Intensive Care, with the truck driver's daughter crying over him. And manages to go for several hours without killing himself.

Eventually, Yee figures it out: he's a demon. (Why a "demon?" Metafictionally, for shock value on Shiga's part. In-universe, it just seems to be the word Yee randomly fell upon to describe himself.) When he dies, he instantaneously takes over the body of whoever is closest to him. He wasn't waking up in the same motel room -- he was serially possessing, and then killing, every single person staying at that motel.

There are a few other rules to his demonic self -- and it turns out to be a SFnal rather than fantasy explanation, as one would expect from Shiga -- which come out in time. But that's basically it: live forever, take over other bodies when you die, do whatever you want without consequences as long as you can find a way to kill yourself.


The Javert to Yee's Valjean is "Agent Hunter, OSS," part of a super-secret US government operation designed to control and utilize demons...of which Yee is the only one when the OSS finds him. (OK, it's not quite that dumb, but it's close -- Shiga is rolling out complications at speed and not worrying a lot about how plausible any of them are.) As usual, Shiga is good on complications and logical extrapolation and sometimes shaky on worldbuilding -- "but what if" is generally good enough for him.

Hunter wants to use Yee, and any other demons there may be -- and Shiga isn't going to let the opportunity to add more baroque complications pass him by -- for a grandiose and supposedly humanitarian purpose. But, of course, to do that, he needs to set up fiendishly complicated control structures to keep Yee confined.

And it's that fiendish complication, both of control and of breakthrough, that Shiga really cares about. Demon is not about what it's like to live forever, to be be able to be anyone, it's about how to do the seemingly impossible using just the demon ability. Even when having the demon ability would let one find more elegant and interesting ways to solve problems, Demon always comes down to "kill lots and lots of people, often but not always yourself repeatedly." Yes, Yee does have his Sad Jaded Immortal moments, since those are required of any story like this, but at least Shiga gets them over with quickly.

What Shiga does take joy in is those complications, and the megadeath is really just a way of keeping score -- for all the gore and horrible things here, Shiga's cartoony art and relentless eye for a weirder, more complicated way to keep demons out or fight their way in is what makes it exciting and fun.

It's a borderline sociopathic kind of fun, admittedly. But it is fun nonetheless.

I don't think the ending entirely makes sense -- Shiga makes one more twist on his demon concept, and I don't see how that actually works -- but he needed to do something like that, just to make an ending for this thing. It's certainly as plausible as anything else in this crazy story.

Fort many, many readers, Demon will be too much. That may include a few of you who think it'll be just fine -- it's the kind of story that just keeps going, and hits places you might not want to go with it. But it's an interesting book by a great comics creator, and it's in many ways the purest Shiga book yet. It is horrifying and laugh-out-loud funny and nutty and goofy and appalling in its inventiveness. It's all Shiga, bless his heart.


[1] It was originally serialized as a webcomic, and then collected. In fact, it seems to still be available online, though I think it's not supposed to be.