Vern: Custodian of the Universe by Tyrell Waiters (2023)
Here’s another comic that I picked up for the title alone. (See also Dracula, Motherf**ker.) Down on his luck and burned out, Vern decides to return to Florida and live with his mom and grandma, who gets him a custodian job at a local science facility. But what seems like a dead-end job soon has Vern cleaning up bizarre science experiments and extra-dimensional anomalies. Oh, and he might have inadvertently set in motion the death of the multiverse. The only solution is to figure out the whole point of existence, so no big deal. Vern: Custodian of the Universe isn’t bad — I love the premise, Vern is a likable enough protagonist, and Tyrell Waiters’ artwork gets delightfully trippy at times — but I also found Vern’s existential conclusions a bit underwhelming and lacking, borderline nihilistic even, though I appreciate the humane spirit in which they’re made. Weirdly enough, Waiters’ comic had me thinking of Jeff Lemire and Matt Kindt’s Cosmic Detective, which is considerably more grim, but also more honest about its philosophical conclusions.
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