Leviathan

Leviathanis a 2000 AD strip written by Ian Edginton and drawn by D'Israeli, with letters by Tom Frame. It was published in progs 1351 to 1360. There were three follow-up stories: 'Chosen Son' (prog 2005, published December 2004); 'McLean's Last Case' (prog 1465); and 'Beyond the Blue Horizon' (prog 1466).

The subject of the main story is the voyage of the huge cruise liner Leviathan, a mile long and half a mile high. She set sail from the Irish Sea to New York in 1928, with 28,000 people on board, but she never arrived. Twenty years later, the Leviathan is adrift in a strange sort of marine Limbo: an empty, lifeless sea stretching to a blank horizon, beneath a sunless, starless sky. The passengers have turned the ship's parks into farms and bred its zoo animals for meat, enabling the upper classes to survive in relative comfort, but conditions in steerage resemble those of the worst Victorian slums. Crime and all sorts of depravity are commonplace below decks, and now a murderer is even picking off the first class passengers. This obviously won't do at all, so the ship's ruling cabal — Lord Copper, Anthony Blanche, Dr Finlay and the Leviathan's owner, William Ashbless — recruit one of the second class passengers to investigate: a policeman, Aurelius Lament.

Lament is enraged when the cabal take the law into their own hands and execute a petty thief whom they have wrongly decided is the murderer. He undertakes the perilous journey into steerage to discover the true cause of the killings. While he is down there he and Sky, a steerage denizen aiding him on his quest, discover that the ship is powered by a huge demon in the engine room. The demon is the slave of William Ashbless, who is actually hundreds of years old, blessed with eternal youth, and the inspiration for Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray. (Edginton loves his Victoriana.) To free the ship, and the souls of all the people who died on it since embarkation, Lament must free the demon by retrieving its soul from Ashbless' watch chain. As soon as this is accomplished the ship docks in New York, the souls of the dead passengers are liberated, and Ashbless and his ex-slave arrive in Hell.

Leviathan is an entertaining and exciting horror story with a strong moral framework, and its artwork is excellent, especially the demon. Parallels with Dante, Doctor Faust and the works of Evelyn Waugh deepen the enjoyment of any reader who spots them, but don't have to be spotted in order for the story to be appreciated. It also manages to be a nifty little exploration of the British class system without being preachy or sanctimonious.