In Perpetuity by Peter & Maria Hoey

The Hoey siblings, Peter and Maria, make graphic stories set in worlds ruled by impersonal forces, with events that are just this side of predetermined and characters who have only a small bit of freedom to choose their fates. It's not quite that everything is foreordained: the details might change slightly. But they're still all doomed to suffer what's coming, one way or another.

That fatalism is clearest in their longest works; the very title of The Bend of Luck implies it. And their new book this year, In Perpetuity, offers another view, a slightly different Hoey world, another way that fates can be sealed and main characters trapped forever.

In Perpetuity is set in a classical underworld, with a dark sun and generally sad air. The shades who live there don't eat or drink, but they do smoke cigarettes and otherwise have lives much like those of living people: apartments, jobs, boxy cars filling freeways with congestion at all hours. The ruler of the afterlife is called Hades; by the end of the book we learn that, yes, it's that Hades, an actual person who is the Greek god. (And presumably the other gods are lurking somewhere, though the only other major classical name we meet, or hear referenced, is Persephone.)

We see them in a city, spread out over hills and valleys near a dark sea. There may be more to the Afterlife than this, but it's what these characters know: A.L., the post-life equivalent of Los Angeles. It's implied that the geography of the Afterlife precisely maps onto that of the living world, but this city is the core and center of the Afterlife as we see it - even Hades' mansion is nearby.

There are police in A.L., patrolling everywhere all the time, and everyone reports regularly to their parole officers, to make sure they're following the apparently draconian laws of their new home. Being dead in A.L. is not the worst possible thing; there may be more punishing realms, plus the constant threat of being "jarred," disembodied and trapped in a vessel for all eternity.

Jim lives in A.L., in a dumpy small apartment - but we get the sense that all of the A.L. is dumpy, all of it faintly disappointing and unhappy all of the time, that this is the kind of world where happiness is just not possible. He works at a gas station, cleaning windshields and checking oil and doing fill-ups, and spends his nights mostly working crossword puzzles that fill the newspaper. (Like a lot of the Hoeys' work, this world is locked fifty or seventy years ago technologically and somewhat socially - with the added twist here that everything, of course, is sadder and duller and less pleasant than anything in the living world.)

But Jim was involved in some minor criminal activity in the living world, and some of his old compatriots find him in the A.L., to drag him into different criminal activity here. It turns out he is a connector, one of the rare people who can be transferred by a medium back to the living world (at the moment of someone else's death, or near-death), do things there, and then send himself back to the A.L. from any convenient patch of real-world darkness.

The criminals' plot isn't clear in all of its details, but there's money smuggled from the A.L. back to the living world, shades who pay to have time in real-world bodies, and a forming larger and more lucrative idea to make movies with stars who died young and gorgeous - since shades stay exactly as they looked when they died, forever.

Jim's initial visits back to the living world are all to meet Olivia, a young woman subject to anaphylactic shocks from bee-stings - and so someone this criminal group can induce to have near-death experiences at will, no matter the damage to her health. 

A noirish plot spins out from there, with Jim - and, to a lesser extent, Olivia - trying to find ways to escape this gang. But, as usual in a noir, there's official corruption as well, and Jim only get snared deeper. Jim makes many trips to the living world, but the criminal gang reaches there as well; there's no place in A.L. or L.A. safe from them. Jim and Olivia do get dragged in front of Hades eventually, and the fact that they're essentially innocents doesn't help.

It ends appropriately, if not what I would call happily. Does any story set in the realm of Hades ever end happily? That sounds like a contradiction in terms.

And, as usual, the Hoeys tell this story in their slightly chilly, formally strong, cleanly structured way I'm still impressed how their style looks like no one else in comics; I could almost take In Perpetuity as an informative handout given to new shades, warning them against getting involved in illegal supernatural activities. It's a good lesson, well told.