Review by Frank Plowright

Carl wakes up one morning feeling fine, but looking very skeletal, and is told by his cat that he’s dead. However, far from death being an eternal rest, Carl has to work in the afterlife, and he’s already fifteen minutes late for his first day. What Carl discovers is that being dead is a lot like being alive, except any element of free will has been removed.

Tommy Devoid has been running Never Been Deader online through Comics Kingdom for several years, and the dry, sardonic tone must have struck a chord for this collection to have been issued. Carl certainly has a visual presence as a cracked skull with occasional eyelids to emphasise his downbeat personality. Stick that oversized skull on a small suit and tie, and there’s a definitely appealing t-shirt design.

However, as a daily strip it lacks so much. Devoid works a three or four panel gag format cutting and pasting one from a small selection of portraits of Carl and then making minor adjustments, such as the placement of pinprick eyeballs. Backgrounds are deemed unnecessary. It’s a format that’s brought considerable success to newspaper strip cartoonists since Garfield showed the way, but it’s hardly visually riveting.

That being the case, the quality of the jokes have to carry the strip, and they also fall short. Conversations lead up to Carl dropping some pithy remark summing up hopelessness, but these are obvious and over more than a hundred pages barely raise a smile. There’s so little substance. Fans of Lenore may decide otherwise, but you’ll know from the sample jokes if Never Been Deader is for you. If it is, another four years of strips await online, now with added colour.