Revolver is a graphic novel created, written, and drawn by Matt Kindt, and published in 2010 by Vertigo Comics.
Sam is an ordinary guy stuck in a white collar hell; he hates his job, his boss is a bitch, and his girlfriend is a materialistic airhead. After once again drinking himself into a coma, Sam wakes up one morning and finds that the world has gone to hell literally overnight. An avian flu pandemic has killed millions in China, Seattle has been wiped off the map by a dirty bomb, and America's infrastructure has collapsed...
Except none of it happened? When Sam wakes up the next day, everything is back to normal. But when he falls asleep again, he's back in that Crapsack World. Sam quickly finds himself living each day twice in a row; once in a world where it's kill or be killed and anything goes, and once in a world where he's completely safe but sleepwalking through his life.
So which one does Sam want to stay in?
This comic book contains the following tropes:
- Affably Evil: Verve is nothing but polite to Sam during both of his interactions with him, and even offers to make Sam his partner.
- Alpha Bitch: Jan fits this trope to a T, at least in the normal timeline. It gets averted in the chaotic timeline, where she and Sam become romantically involved.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted. The chaotic timeline's Jan gets her nose broken during Sam's first day there, and spends the rest of the comic wearing a bandage over it.
- Bittersweet Ending: Sam sacrifices himself so the military can bomb Verve's hideout, killing them both in the chaotic timeline. He stops waking up there, meaning he'll never see that version of Jan again, while the normal timeline's Jan will never know how close she and Sam became. Sam then goes on a road trip with Maria to San Francisco, where he plans to kill Verve again, and it's implied that he also plans to kill himself, since he quit his job and sold everything he owns.
- Disproportionate Retribution: When Sam sees Jan for his review, he makes a remark to the effect that he hasn't been sleeping well, and Jan's response is to yell at him to start going to sleep earlier. Then she gives Sam a 3% raise, but only since she can't give him less without getting in legal trouble.
- The Dog Was the Mastermind: That motivational speaker who keeps popping up on TV and in advertisements? It turns out he's a terrorist mastermind using his connections in the normal timeline to wreak havoc in the chaotic one in retaliation for his brother's death.
- First-Name Basis: With the exception of Verve and Maria's dad, every single character is only referred to by their first names.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop / Mental Time Travel: This is possibly what's happening to Sam; He lives every day twice, and soon starts using information he gets in one timeline to his advantage in another, learning how to hotwire a car, memorizing where a boat is to bypass a military checkpoint, and using information Jan gives him in the chaotic timeline to blackmail her in the normal timeline to let him go see Verve's seminar in San Francisco.
- It's All About Me: Maria displays shades of this in the chaotic timeline, being more upset about how all her stuff was either looted or destroyed than her parents being dead.
- Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: In the chaotic timeline, PK Verve and his brother, Robert, were immigrants who made their fortune after they founded a tech start-up. Robert made a hobby out of flying ultralight planes, but when he convinced PK to come flying with him one day, they crashed. PK miraculously survived, but Robert didn't. It's implied the government orchestrated the crash somehow, since they were keeping an eye on the brothers and were afraid of how influential they were becoming. After the crash, PK woke up in Sam's timeline to discover Robert was alive, but the next day, he woke up back in his own timeline where Robert was still dead. PK thus decided to become a motivational speaker in Sam's timeline, using his fortune and connections to treat his own timeline as his personal playground; if the government was scared of him, then he'd give them a reason to be scared.
