"Therefore Repent! If You Do Not, I Will Come to You Soon and Fight Against Them With the Sword of My Mouth." -Revelation 2:16
Therefore, Repent! is a post-rapture graphic novel written by Jim Munroe, with art by Salgood Sam. Since the rapture, humans have begun manifesting strange supernatural powers, albeit with some side effects. The main characters are Mummy and Raven, who have just moved to Chicago from Canada and are getting settled in.
In stark contrast to Left Behind, the people trying to get on God's good side believing themselves to be a tribulation force, along with God and the angels, are the villains, who are called "splitters", while the heroes are the "immoral majority", trying to adapt to life without Christians as angels are going around randomly murdering people. Also has a sequel, Sword Of My Mouth.
Tropes
- An Aesop: Urban organic farming gets promoted as a means of fighting the system in the sequel.
- Anarchy Is Chaos: Averted. The remaining people on earth form tight-knit communities, even without leaders or law enforcement.
- Anti-Magical Faction: The angels hate magic to the point of killing people who were merely watching it.
- Becoming the Costume: Raven takes off her mask to reveal that she now has the head of an actual raven.
- Black Magic: At first, a lot of people fear magic as an evil force, and it doesn't help that it mutates people and that the angels kill everyone who openly uses it.Subverted at the end, where Mummy explains that magic is perfectly natural and that people were supposed to use it.
- Dark Is Not Evil: All of the people left behind and especially those that can use magic.
- Epileptic Trees: In-universe example: Mummy speculates that the angels are really an Alien Invasion, just using religious trappings as a way to infiltrate our society. Which doesn't make a whole lot sense since one of the angels is a dead human turned into angel, implying the humans are dead humans.
- God Is Evil: A lot of people begin to believe this, what with angels rounding up people and killing them. At the very end, this is subverted when Raven and Mummy find that magic was always supposed to exist, and speculate that the angels have nothing to do with God (and, in fact, that God might have removed the barrier preventing humans from using magic).
- The Grotesque: Bizarre, sometimes horrifying mutations are a side effect of using magic.
- Holier Than Thou: Splitters (in contrast with Left Behind's Flat-Earth Atheist villains) are self-righteous, fundamentalist Christians who believe that the Rapture will happen in two waves, and that if they are good and "holy" enough, they will be part of the second wave.
- Knight Templar: The Angels certainly qualify, as their sole purpose is to eliminate the "sinful" people left behind.
- The Magic Comes Back: Magic was always supposed to exist on Earth, but an anti-magic field prevented anyone from using it. That field disappeared for unknown reasons, and now everyone can use it. In fact, this is why the Rapture happened. All of the people caught in the Rapture were actually just levitating themselves (into space!) by accident.
- Real-Person Cameo: George W. Bush appears on TV in an interview with "Mr. Christ." Still a bit ironic that he gets left behind.
- Take That!: Against the Left Behind series.
- Talking Animal: Dogs can learn to speak human languages by tearing out and eating the larynx of a dead human. This becomes a brief problem for Raven and Mummy's dog when Gerry accidentally revives the person whose voice he stole.
- Too Dumb to Live: The Anti-Magical Faction, the Angels, are trained soldiers who kill people for so much as watching magic. The trope applies to the management of a local bar that decides to have a magic show with real magic. Also applies to the audience. It ends as expected.
