"And the earth was filled with violence."
In the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve are banished from the Garden of Eden and their oldest son Cain kills his younger brother Abel.
1,600 years later, the world has become irrevocably corrupt. Civilizations have come and gone and what remains of humanity are corrupt, monstrous savages who indulge in debauchery and barbarity. Those who believe in God see the world as a doomed and wicked place, and there are those who believe that God will wipe the sleight clean and flood the world.
Cain, the man who invented murder and was cursed by God for it, seeks out the one thing he wants more than anything: an end to his eternal life.
The Goddamned is a 2015 Image Comics series written by Jason Aaron (Thor: God of Thunder (2012)) and illustrated by R.M. Guera (Scalped)
The Goddamned provides examples of:
- Adaptational Villainy: In the Book of Genesis, Noah is portrayed as a humble, god-fearing individual who builds the Ark with nothing but himself and his family, his efforts to save others being met with mockery. Here, he is a Churchgoing Villain who either slaughters or enslaves the various people that inhabits the wasteland.
- Bittersweet Ending: In The Virgin Brides, Sharri confesses her love for Jael with her dying breath and Jael managed to end New Eden's machinations with the help of The Kingdom. While her fellow "brides" are too indoctrinated to appreciate it, it's implied that they will eventually realize the heroics of what Jael did. Now an adult, Jael roams the Earth to kill the Nephilim run amok.
- Crapsack World: The story is set in Biblical times and it is not pretty. The world is portrayed as an inhospitable wasteland populated by monsters, monstrous cannibal savages and religious zealots, all under the watchful eye of a divine power that might be just as corrupt as the world it holds sovereignty over.
- Dies Differently in Adaptation: In the Book of Genesis, Noah died at age 950 of natural causes long after The Great Flood. Here, he didn't even finish the Ark before Cain kills him with his bone tomahawk.
- Downer Ending: Before the Flood ends with Noah dying before he could build his Ark before the Flood. Cain's hope of a Nephilim ending his life proves fruitless, and while regains his will to live at the thought of staying with Aga and Lodo, Lodo kills Aga after his time as Noah's slave corrupts him. Cain is now back to square one: alone and unable to end his misery in a hopelessly unforgiving world.
- Frazetta Man: A lot of the primitive humans are portrayed as more ape-like mongrels than people, implied to be the result of both their barbaric lifestyles and inbreeding.
- The Fundamentalist: The story takes a very antitheistic portrayal of the Abrahamic God, so a lot of his followers are portrayed as insane, delusional and no less barbaric than the savage tribes they claim superiority over.
- Hope Spot: Cain regains his will to live after he saves a greatful Aga and her son Lodo, and he even considers staying with them until Lodo's time as Noah's slave compels him to kill his mother, believing that she made him "weak".
- Jerkass Gods: While Cain isn't exactly unbiased, the story lands credence to the idea that the Biblical God is, at-best, apathetic to humanity's suffering, is an actively sadistic monster at worse.Cain: He hears everything. Every scream. Every cry, every whimper. Every plea for mercy. For death. He hears. He just doesn't give a fuck.
- Lady Land: New Eden is an isolated nunnery cult populated entirely of women. They believe that the "sons of Adam" (regular human men) are impure and their warrior caste will routinely leave the mountain range to kill men, kidnapping their virgin daughters to replenish their stock of "brides". These "brides" are routinely sacrificed to God where they "marry the sons of God" (i.e. raped by angels) and produce Nephilim spawn that they keep in pens.
- Nephilim: Like in most Biblical lore, Nephilim here are portrayed as monstrous giant men born from angels raping human women. In The Virgin Brides, it's revealed that the various Nephilim that roam the lands were cultivated by a Cult of women, breeding them using virgin girls they kidnap and raise as brood-mares.
- Our Demons Are Different: The closest we see to demons are The Kingdom, a race of sentient talking snakes with small bat wings.
- Reluctant Warrior: Cain's immortality makes him invincible and his age leaves him little patience for the savages that plague the badlands, so while he is perfectly willing to slaughter his way out of a tidelwave of wild-men, he won't actively seek out a fight.
- Stone Punk: The story is set 16 centuries after Adam and Eve's exile from Eden and before The Great Flood, and the most advanced tech we ever see are iron weapons and wheeled caravans, though Cain's recognition of these advancements imply that they are rediscovered and reinvented as civilizations rise and fall.
- Sword and Sorcery: The series has elements of the genre. Morally-grey Barbarian Heroes with nothing but bones for weapons, Amazonian Beauties, a Sandal Punk setting full of giant beasts of dubious physiologies, barbaric Frazetta Men, giants, cults and cult-leaders, curses and the duality between faith in oneself and a higher power against an unforgiving world.
- Who Wants to Live Forever?: The mark of Cain gives him a Healing Factor and Resurrective Immortality, having wandered the Earth for over 1,600 years since he "invented murder." He has since spent that entire time surviving monsters and monstrous humans, trying and failing to die at every opportunity.
