Review by Karl Verhoven
The sample art shows Maceo ending the tour of his premises after meeting Mezzy for the first time, astounded that another human exists. Maceo has seen out the end of the world trapped in a skyscraper with all kinds of facilities that he’s modified Home Alone style with protective devices, while Mezzy who has to fight for every bite, is astounded such a sanctuary exists.
Despite the desperate circumstances, Jason Aaron succeeds in tagging readers along for some while, having them suppose all is going to be well with a buddy book where the defences of the frosty character are gradually broken down by the cheerful one. Except then there’s a jump a few decades into the future, and all is impossibly grim.
Aaron’s projects are generally testosterone personified. Cute and romantic are locations so far removed from his previous template as to be invisible, yet cute and romantic is what much of Once Upon a Time At the End of the World is. The mismatched buddy contrast works well from the beginning, with the backgrounds of both characters explaining their personalities, and artist Alexandre Tefenkgi playing up that up in the way they’re portrayed. Maceo is wide-eyed and innocent, while Mezzy is nearly always scowling.
While innocent, Maceo is technically resourceful, and when not spreading gloom via the decayed landscape, Tefenkgi’s versions of his constructions is a delight. He also tells a lot through posture, and it works well with Aaron’s method of drip-feeding information on a need to know basis. However, Aaron’s a man with plan and isn’t making it up as he goes along. The testosterone years mean he also has an admirable way with a terse piece of dialogue such as “Where I come from… they teach you to survive at all costs. And for me to survive… I needed to leave”, where even the pauses are important.
Maceo and Mezzy aren’t all there is to Once Upon A Time, but Aaron keeps others in the background until we’ve come to know his leads well enough. These others conform more readily to the Aaron catalogue, being murderous and tenacious, raised in Dickensian fashion to absolute obedience, but even that comes with the hilarious visual twist of a sedan chair. That about sums up the series in this first volume, mixing survivalist horror with moments of eccentricity, some plain bizarre and others uplifting. At times Aaron seems to be straying into a satire of the USA’s current divisions between those who believe in equality and those who label any attempt at consideration for others with a pejorative “woke”, but that’s the dressing, not the substance.
The horror of the future hangs over everything, gruesomely drawn in segments of a few pages at a time by Nick Dragotta, but we’re too familiar with alternate futures to accept that as gospel.
Book Two is naturally enough the continuation, while publication of the complete story in a single edition is scheduled for late 2025.
