Every now and then, one finds a perfect combination of complementary reading material. Some time ago, I pointed out the happy combination of Saul David’s The Indian Mutiny followed by George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman in the Great Game.
Now, I can heartily recommend John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Supergod and The Son of Man Wonder in issue 170 (November 2007) of Viz (p. 42-43). Supergod refuses to help a bus full of orphans teetering on the edge of a bridge:
You see, I’m not generally speaking what you’d call an interventionist God. When I created man I gave him free will and those orphans were exercising their free will when they boarded that bus. So you see, if I’d prevented those orphans from dying, I would have been taking that freedom away from them. Or something like that. It’s all quite complicated.
fr. 7-8
Similarly, Milton’s God, after letting Satan escape from Hell by putting Satan’s own daughter (Sin) and son (Death) on guard at the gates (who, naturally, let him go), keeping an insufficient watch on Paradise where his angels do not spot Satan’s entrance, and giving Adam and Eve one day’s warning of Satan’s presence in the Garden of Eden, makes clear where the blame will lie in the foretold fall of Man:
so will fall
He and his faithless progeny: whose fault?
Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me
All he could have; I have made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
III, 95-99
After failing to save an old woman who is the victim of a mugger on the grounds that the mugger will receive a harsh punishment in the afterlife, Supergod replies to the woman’s thanks thus:
Think nothing of it, Ma’am. The only thanks I require is to be praised and worshipped in your every word and deed.
fr. 20
Milton’s God emphasises the need for free will in worship:
What pleasure I from such obedience paid,
When will and reason (reason is also choice)
Useless and vain, of freedom both despoiled,
Made passive both, had served necessity,
Not me.
II, 106-111
They are both ace, especially the escape from Hell by Satan in Paradise Lost where I also stumbled on the quote about His dark materials
, which made more sense in context. The Supergod strip is, however, considerably shorter. You also get read the exploits of Flush Gordon on other pages.