The Surface Of The Sun

Cerebus #289/290 (April/May 2003)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard

DAVE SIM:
(from The Blog & Mail, 20 February 2007)

...I was rather pleased with myself when I came up with the idea that for life on planet Earth, the ultimate hell is our sun beside which the interior of the earth is just a mere blob by comparison. As a God-fearing person you obviously picked up on that right away. But it's another example of how those who aren't "rightly guided" can't be "rightly guided". The earth's molten core or the convection systems on the sun: what's the difference? There is simply no sense of proportion, no sense of the enormity of what it is going to be like for tiny little souls like us to be vacuumed up by the gravitational enormity of the sun and to be trapped within it while it goes through hundreds of millions of years of excruciating contortions before ultimately collapsing in on itself. I mean, to combine that fate with the sure knowledge that at any point in the millions-of-year histories of each of our souls (taking it as a given that each soul is immortal) we had every opportunity to escape that fate and return to God and that we essentially made the wrong choices, intentionally, for those millions of years…

…and then to be blithely philosophical about that as if anything that far in the future just doesn't apply to us - what WE need to do is to win the lottery or get laid or find a way to buy a nicer car. It's like so many escalating layers of compounded misery that the mind literally can't encompass Just How Bad The Whole Thing is Going to Get. As with everything else that involves the enormous unfolding of God's plan, the God-fearing mind just fairly boggles even trying to grasp the sketchy outlines and the atheistic mind sees nothing there at all.

You know I ran across my original two-page spread of the surface of the sun that I ultimately rejected from The Last Day just a while ago. I had rejected it because it was just too chaotic and over the top. I think I've changed my mind and I'll be reworking it and plugging it into the next printing. Of course it's over the top. It's HELL! I can still feel the frisson of horror that I first experienced when I put the pieces together: My soul is immortal. Whether my soul ends up sleeping in the earth or whirling around in earth's atmosphere or restlessly (and inexplicably) haunting the garden implements section at the local Home Depot, my soul is still going to be here in some proximity to this planet and consciously aware when the sun begins to swell into a Red Giant and basically cracks the earth open like an eggshell and devours everything that ever was upon or within the earth. I'll be right there experiencing it. No escape possible.