Joshua Hale Fialkov Explains The Life After’s Hemingway Connection

Joshua Hale Fialkov and Gabo’s new Oni Press title The Life After debuts its first issue today in print and on ComiXology.

Back when it was being promoted, a quote was circulating that the book was “the comic Hemingway would have written if he’d read Saga. That seemed at the time like the creators may have thought quite a bit about themselves, all things considered, but in the context of the book — where Hemingway is a surprise character who appears near the end and will apparently be a sort of spirit guide to Jude, the book’s protagonist — it makes a lot more sense.

The title takes place in a specific level of purgatory reserved for those who have killed themselves — and while most people aren’t really aware of what’s going on, Jude is — and he apparently has the potential to break out. It’s that potential that Hemingway sees in him, and comes looking to nudge Jude in that direction.

Back when Fialkov recently spoke with ComicBook.com about the then-upcoming series, we quizzed him on Hemingway’s involvement in the title.

“Part of why we ended up at Hemingway is that if you read those Hemingway books — like I’m re-reading A Farewell to Arms right now — what’s interesting about those books is that they’re almost like tone poems,” Fialkov said. “There’s a plot, there’s a direction, there’s a story that he’s telling but a lot of what you’re getting is just sort of almost these abstract impressions of the places that he’d been and the things that he’d seen and the stories of the people around him — and that really is the heart of what the book is. It has that literary feeling where we get to see as Jude uses his powers, so to speak, on other people, he gets to see these snippets of people’s lives and how they got to where they are — how they found themselves trapped in this specific purgatory. So the hope is that we get to have this sort of sprawling text that has all these different people’s lives jumbled up against our hero and where he’s going and what he’s trying to do.”

So, alright, that explains having Hemingway around — but he’s not just a prop; he’s a main character in the title. What’s that all about?

“And then having Ernest Hemingway be the sidekick — the thing about Ernest Hemingway is that he knows everything,” Fialkov explained. “That was his thing. He is super-smart and super-prepared and super hands-on. And he thinks he has this place wired — he’s been walking around in the afterlife, aware exactly of where he is and why he’s there. But very quickly it becomes clear that he doesn’t know everything. Very quickly it becomes clear that this is the great adventure of his life.”