The Last Mortician: A New Web Comic Presses Philosophical Questions

Novelist Tim Hall and Emmy-award winning illustrator Dean Haspiel have collaborated to create a stunningly beautiful and brilliant new web comic. The Last Mortician, published at Tor, imagines a future in which through advanced medical technology, people are able to escape death and live eternally. Universal immortality has made the mortician just another obsolete profession.

The character, the last mortician, wanders a hollow utopia learning how to live with “love in an age of deathlessness”, as Tim Hall calls it in a behind the scenes look at the making of the comic.

He also learns to acclimate himself to an era in which people can “build hearts that never give out, but cannot build a love that lasts” and “eyes that never go blind, but cannot see either”.

The Last Mortician, in the tradition of Brave New World, and the great spiritual masters, explores and examines the darkest and toughest questions. What is the meaning of death? What is the value of death? What is love? How does one find and protect love? What makes life worth living? How does one live excellently, rather than just live eternally?

Here’s hoping that Hall and Haspiel continue to investigate those questions, and turn The Last Mortician into a graphic novel.