No matter how bad your job is, you can always quit. Shut up: you can. It may make things hard for you financially, your mom might get pissy with you, your husband might leave you, your kids might starve but the fact remains: you can quit. It is within your power. Now, if you can quit, then your boss can quit. And her boss. And hers, and on up the chain. Whatever the job, anybody can quit. Even the Devil. And that's the premise of SEASON OF MISTS - what if the Devil decided to up and quit?
Our story begins with Destiny, the oldest of the Endless, gathering the family for a little house meeting. In my experience, family meetings never go too well (think Thanksgiving) and this one's no exception. Desire gets huffy with Dream for sentencing his ex to an eternity in Hell and Dream feels sorry for himself and whines about being picked on to his older sister, Death. Death calls him on it: Dude, she's right. You're being a pissy little bitch. (Gaiman puts it more eloquently, but that's the gist.) Dream sees himself through his sister's eyes as the vindictive twit he's been and sets out to rectify the error, which involves - quite literally - going to Hell. These things never go smoothly, do they? It turns out Dream is still on Lucifer's shitlist for that stunt he pulled back in Preludes and Nocturnes, so the Devil takes this opportunity to do what he's been wanting to do for centuries: he evicts everybody in Hell, quits his job and turns in his keys. He turns the keys to Hell over to Dream, who finds himself in possession of the most valuable piece of psychic real estate he never wanted. Now he's got to get rid of it and it's not like he can just call Century 21, you know?
The moral of the story: try to take the high road when you're dumped. Otherwise, all Hell breaks loose. (You saw that coming, didn't you?)
Kelly Sue DeConnick relocated from Brooklyn, New York to Kansas City, MO, where she lives with her husband and artbomb.net colleague, Matt Fraction. Kelly Sue writes the English adaptations of several manga titles published by Tokyopop and Viz. She can be found on the web at kellysue.com.
