I first came across Life and Death during the Crossover Wars. It was a one-shot, and didn’t really do anything more than give us a quick joke, but the comic still caught my attention. LaD is primarily a gag-a-day strip that utilizes puns, word play, and the occasional storyline to keep people interested. In particular, death-related humor frequently scampers across the panels with a reliance of puns that would have my former roommate struggling to breathe. I have no doubt that Steve, who was hired to be Death after he brought a shotgun to the job interview, would wait with glee and try to drive my roommate over the edge until he keeled over.

The majority of LaD comics follows Steve’s antics as he tries to kill people whose time has come. He’s a mixture of Wiley Coyote and Invader Zim, with a large dash of competence mixed in, and takes a huge amount of delight in killing people off when their time has come. He doesn’t always succeed. Indeed, he takes tremendous offense when someone manages to outwit (or even accidentally evade) him. But whether he’s chasing the cast of Final Destination across the panel with a chainsaw or dragging the corpse of an idiot who jumped out a window to evade him, just to burn the body in an apartment fire (which was the original intended death), Steve manages to take tremendous pride in his work.

Perhaps of more interest than the various deathly antics of Death can be found with Steve’s coworkers, who include his friend Bobby who works as Life, various angels, Time (who is naturally enough a woman and an impromptu nurse – Time heals all wounds, and waits for no man), Chaos, God, some valkyries (including Brunhilde from The Kamics who is dating Bobby), and other assorted entities. If Jonathan Oliver can pull a pun out of it, you can be sure the character will make an appearance. Despite the preponderance toward humor and blatant silliness, LaD manages to mix story in with its humor. Even at the darkest moments of the comic, Oliver manages more often than not to find something funny to add to the strip. That in and of itself makes LaD worth reading; assuming that the puns don’t kill you that is.