The Pull List – High Heaven #2
Bunk Beds, Peanut Crackers and one channel TV isn’t enough for David Weather’s idea of Heaven. After suffering a humiliating moment before his death, he thought things would turn around in the afterlife. To his misery, the afterlife is full of things that he can’t stop complaining about. But there might be some chance to change all this, an escape from all the things he finds annoying. While talking to his uncle, David discovers his own parents found a way out. Now David is on a mission to make an escape and get out himself.
Issue two of High Heaven takes a cynical view of spending an eternally in the less luxurious fashion. This version of Heaven isn’t the fluffy clouds with angels playing harps, but a realistic take on heaven with a housing problem. Since everyone has an ideal version of heaven, its a devastating blow to David’s sanity when heaven doesn’t match at all to what he dreamt. Unleashing a barrage of complaints since he arrived in the clouds, David has no friends, but many enemies. Not looking forward to an eternally of being less popular than he was in during his time alive, he is willing to go to any place to get away.
Tom Peyer shakes up the perspective of heaven by having heaven not be the place that caters to individual joy, but a place that is a one size fits all. And somethings that kind of universal appeal stinks. Peyer leads David into a bland version of heaven that should drive anyone a tab crazy. Greg Scot, Andy Troy, and Rob Steen paint a bleak looking heaven, filled with dirty housing projects, scruffy looking citizens, roman angels and something straight from the pages of Cthulhu. High Heaven should not be missed as the hilarious story that only gets better as David wanders into his next unfortunate trouble.
Included in this issue; there is a new story for Hashtag: Danger by Tom Peyer and Chris Giarrusso, a short story about an artist from Carol Lay, a Q&A with Tom Peyer by Hart Seely, a written piece about Leon Trotsky by Kek – W, and a short story about graffiti by Austin Wilson.
In the latest installment of Hashtag: Danger; Einstein Armstrong, Sugar Rae Huang, and Desiree Danger try to stop an alien spaceship from destroying the Sydney Opera House. The aliens, representatives of the Cephalozon Empire, have come to destroy the planet, but are destroyed by their own space pet. The Hashtag: Danger crew takes in the cute looking creature, unaware of the hidden danger that hides inside. Chapter two of Hashtag: Danger gets a closer look at the team as they face a great danger and a not so subtle danger in the form of the cute looking alien known as Glorp. This teddy bear looking alien is adorable to Sugar and Desiree, both who let their guard down. But the overly cautious Einstein is wary of strange creatures, choosing to let science lead over cuteness. The series is fun and colorful, playfully throwing the characters in hilarious moments.
Carol Lay wrote and illustrated a piece called Art Whore, a story about an artist that discusses a potential project with a client. While the title is a bit vulgar, this has nothing to do about sex, but an artist willing to commission art for clients she finds is worth an exchange of values. Artists sometimes have to take jobs that they don’t find too keen on performing, sacrificing personal values in for money. In this story, a potential client tries to find the boundary in one artist’s belief.
Kek – W takes a closer look at the last years of Leon Trotsky in The Death of Leon Trotsky, which highlights the crazy cat and mouse game between Leon Trotsky and his assassin, Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río. For more than a decade, Trotsky avoids deadly surprises from Mercader, leading to a global chase that ends in Mexico. Kek – W describes the many cases where Trotsky misses death, which all sound fictitious, but are actually true events. Artist Rick Geary gives an illustration of just one of the events.
Austin Wilson tells a story about a small town’s graffiti incident on a water tower in Be-Rasts. In the story, a sheriff and two deputies speculate on the fate of a high schooler that is suspected of writing the Be-rasts and what it could mean. Wilson creates a funny reading experience that patiently builds up to one chucking moment. Elliott Mattice provides an illustration to the story.