I started this comic during finals week at my college as a way to de-stress. I thought I would just read a little bit to take my mind off things, so naturally I couldn’t stop reading and finished the whole thing in one night. Did I really have to study for my German exam? Did I really have to get 8 hours sleep? Did I really have to eat dinner, or do anything except keep my bloodshot eyes locked tightly to every single page? Man, those comics, those are the best kinds of comics.

That's not to say A Better Place is flawless, though. There are a lot of things that I would have loved to have seen done differently, #1 among them being that I really wish this story was told from Hannah’s POV. All the best parts, in my opinion, are with her. It’s not that the other characters are boring, far from it, it’s that Hannah is too interesting! The overshadowing of the rest of the cast is also not helped by the general premise of their mission: Go to the four cities to get the four items that put together can defeat Hannah. That just feels so videogame-y, which is ironic since Hannah has modeled her dream society off of videogames, and the general theme of the anti-theists is to give life meaning again by showing that this safe, hedonistic meaninglessness is poison and antithetical to life. I would have preferred that the story focused on Hannah dealing with the crushing responsibility of absolute power over the main plot of attempting to dethrone her. Instead, most of the insight into what she experiences on a day-to-day basis comes in the form of text blurbs added as bonuses below each page, many of which are honestly more interesting than the comic itself.

That’s also why the ending kind of bites a little, I really think Hannah shouldn’t have just let herself die like that. The theme of the comic wasn’t that she went too far in trying to save the world, or even that no one should hold the kind of power she held, it’s that the amount of responsibility she took upon herself was too much for any one person to endure. But instead of trying to work with the people who care about her, she just allows herself to bleed out even though they’re begging her to heal herself. It left kind of a hollow feeling.