Eight Billion Genies
Charles Soule and Ryan Browne have been working independently and together in the comics industry for a while now. They’ve produced some good comics together and independently over the years, but neither has had what you would call a breakout success. By that I mean a series that everyone starts talking about, that generates multiple reorders of multiple issues, and turns out to be a shocking sales success to anyone who pays attention to that kind of stuff. That’s not a bad thing as I’ve enjoyed plenty of the comics they’ve produced and was going to keep reading them regardless of how they sold.
Then along comes “Eight Billion Genies” and it winds up being that breakout success that I honestly thought neither of them would enjoy. It was a crazy concept, to be sure, but one that resonated with the general comics readership and made me eager to see what they were enjoying on a monthly basis (for eight months). The end result is easily the best thing they’ve done together, even if it did leave me feeling that it wasn’t quite as good as it could’ve been.
The setup for this series is simple: One day the population of Earth reaches eight billion humans. In the next instant, every human gets their own genie who grants them one wish. There are rules, though. Contradictory wishes cancel each other out. You can transfer your wish to another person. Babies aren’t able to have their wishes granted until they’re old enough to properly articulate their wishes. There are more rules than that. Enough to make you suspect this series was written by a lawyer.
Yet there are plenty of people who are ready to use their wishes to benefit themselves. Some use it for money. Others for health. One person wishes themselves up a lightsaber. A couple use it to become individual Godzillas. People wish to become superheroes – and supervillains. The world ultimately devolves into utter chaos. How is anyone supposed to tell a story in a place like this?
Likely because the first thing Soule has someone wish for is for a place to provide narrative stability. While I’ve characterized the man’s work as “ruthlessly competent” in the past, he’s demonstrated lots of cleverness along with that competency as well over the years. Both of which are manifest here in that first wish and how the series is structured. Which is why we see the story play out over the first eight seconds and minutes in the first issue, the first eight hours in the second, the first eight days, in the third, and so on until the first eight centuries.
Over the course of that timeframe we meet a diverse and interesting group of people who are in the dive bar known as the Lamp Wick when G-Day happens. There’s Ed, the drunk who’s 12-year-old son comes to get him on his birthday. Brian, Alex, and Daisy, the members of the band, the Bad-a-Bangs who were there to play the bar that day. Wang and Lifeng Zhang, who came to the Lamp Wick by mistake, are expecting their first child, and are taking steps to ensure their family’s future. As well as Will Williams, the bar’s proprietor. He’s the one who made that wish for narrative stability and may know more about what’s going on than he says.
Other characters show up over the course of the series, but the characters mentioned here are the core ensemble the series follows to its end. They’ll go to some very strange places, physically speaking, but maybe not so much in a narrative sense. That may have been a dealbreaker in another series, but when you’re dealing with a series where the moon comes alive to chomp down on a passing Santa and his reindeer, the familiarity doesn’t sting as much. They’re sketched out well enough, initially, to give us a reason to care whether or not they live or die and some also get a decent amount of development over the course of the series.
Which is good because this series uses its premise as a license to showcase some truly insane visuals, particularly in the early days. This is a case where seeing a guy in a Carosaurus rampaging over the top of the Lamp Wick is one of the least crazy things you’ll see here. Giant corncob people fighting. A gigantic city of fun on the back of a flying whale. A woman who lives to regret wishing to become one with the sea. It’s all nuts and that’s even before I’ve mentioned the superheroes.
Drawing all of this imaginatively bizarre stuff requires someone who’s well-versed in such things, and that’s where Browne gets to show off. He may have worked with Soule on “Curse Words,” but his best work has always been on the deranged “God Hates Astronauts” series. So he’s perfect for the particular brand of insanity on display here. Particularly when we get to the time period involving superheroes as that part feels like the closest we’ll get to a follow-up to that classic series (though there are a few cameos here).
While having the chops to draw everything asked of him here is definitely a strength for Browne, he’s also good with the non-crazy parts of the series. I mentioned the familiarity of the characters and their arcs, and the artist is also pretty good at selling them as well. There’s a bit early on where one individual has to get past his own failings to do right by his son and you really feel the emotion and subsequent euphoria of the scene. He’s also good with communicating the lifetimes of regret and resignation felt by the characters at the end of the story as they talk things out in a bar.
That’s not a bad way to end the series. However, if you’re thinking it may indicate that “Eight Billion Genies” becomes less insane over the course of its run, you’d be right. It’s something that was inevitable, given the level at which things started out at. The good news is that by the time order starts overtaking chaos, you’re invested enough in the plight of the characters to want to follow them to their journeys’ ends.
The bad news is that the series ends on what feels like an overly sentimental note. We get some grand statements about the nature of humanity and wind up with what I think is meant to be the mega-happy ending. It’s fine for what it is, but it feels too neat and clean compared to what has gone before. For a series that started out with nigh-unmitigated madness, this ending doesn’t really satisfy. Maybe it was Soule and Browne’s hope that we’d be tired out by what we’ve read up to this point that we’d welcome such a straightforward finish. I wasn’t, and like so many other character in “Eight Billion Genies” I was left wanting more.
I’d still qualify this as a minor disappointment since I still enjoyed the series overall. It showed me a lot of things I wasn’t expecting to see and found a clever way to tell a story about what initially seemed like an unworkable premise. I even got to meet some really interesting characters along the way. “Eight Billion Genies” is a clear step up from “Curse Words” for this creative team and, minor failings aside, I still want to see what they do together next.
Especially if it involves what the Empire State Building is supposed to turn into.