Indie Initiative: The Forgotten Divine is a Dream Worth Having

Ahoy Comics is home to comics that use witty satire to take the piss out of society. The home for Toxic Avenger comics is also the place to find some of their other titles like Babs and Ancestral Recall. Their latest book, The Forgotten Divine, is the first they’ve crowdfunded through a Kickstarter campaign. Written by Second Coming scribe Mark Russell and drawn by Russ Braun (The Boys), The Forgotten Divine is a sci-fi drama about Rodney, an unhoused vet with PTSD who confesses to having dreams of a world with a giant eye and aliens surrounding it.

When Rodney confesses these dreams to his therapist, he writes it off as a side effect of his meds. However, soon his therapist is having dreams, too. Eventually, they set up a support group for others also affected by these dreams. As the number of members grows, it attracts the attention of the federal government, and that’s before things get out of hand. 

Mining the same sense of disenfranchisement that Fight Club does, Mark Russell levels the playing field by uniting the characters of The Forgotten Divine with these visions of aliens. The sequences with the alien dreams are nightmare-fueled fevers that you’ll be glad live on the pages of this comic and not in real life. Like a lot of great satire, the world is as much of a character as the people who populate it. While the story in front of you is happening, there are some really good Easter eggs all over that give personality to this hyperbolized world of extraterrestrial believers.

With indie comics, a tale this big has to be economical with its storytelling, and Russell and Braun use that space well. While a few things may feel a little hurried, the story doesn’t suffer from it. Each chapter runs about fifteen pages but still feels full without being too lean on its quirks. The Forgotten Divine’s Kickstarter campaign launches today. Please go out and support Ahoy Comics’ quest to bring quality stories to the hands of readers.

Check out more of Forrest’s articles, here.

Back the book: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/comicsahoy/the-forgotten-divine-by-mark-russell-and-russ-braun