The Life Eaters

Lore & Background

The story diverges in late 1943 when bright lights appear over Nazi-occupied Europe. The slaughter of death camps has been used to summon the Norse gods, the Æsir. Nazi Germany allies with them and uses magical cyclones to cripple the Allies at Normandy. By the 1960s, the Nazis have conquered Great Britain, Africa, Russia, and invaded Canada. The first third follows OSS Captain Chris Turing, who leads a mission to attack Valhalla near Gotland using an airlifted submarine carrying a hydrogen bomb. The trickster god Loki aids the team, having earlier used magic to rescue hundreds of thousands of death camp internees to Persia. The mission fails, but Turing destroys Odin's Spear, inspiring human resistance.

Reader's Guide

The Life Eaters is significant as a provocative alternate history that critiques the glorification of myth and superheroes. David Brin's afterword notes that modern popular culture forgets the sinister side of myth and that the story's message is that salvation will come from ordinary people, not super-empowered beings. Comics researcher Ralf Palandt in 2012 called the work 'mythically overburdened' and 'highly provocative', criticizing its use of the Holocaust as trivializing. Joanne Pettitt in 2017 and 2018 analyzed the work as an example of how Nazism has become akin to mythological heroes in cultural imagination, and discussed the problematic simplification of the Holocaust into a pop culture symbol, while noting the story can be read as a critique of that approach. The work has been translated into French and republished by IDW Publishing in 2013.

Did You Know?

• The story is based on David Brin's Nebula-nominated novella Thor Meets Captain America, first published in 1986.
• The first third of the graphic novel is a retelling of that novella.
• The novel was translated into French as D-day, le jour du désastre in 2004.
• In the story, the Nazis used death camps to fuel necromancy to summon the Norse gods.