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# Never Having to Say "Goodbye" in Brian "Box" Brown's Forevr
- URL: https://www.fromcovertocover.com/never-having-to-say-goodbye-in-brian-box-browns-forevr/
- Published: 2026-10-23T03:43:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T03:42:59.000Z
- Description: Do electric ghosts dream of android sheep?
- Author: Scott Cederlund
- Tags: brian "box" brown, top shelf comix, 2026, Reviews

In **Forevr**, [Brian “Box” Brown](https://www.fromcovertocover.com/tag/brian-box-brown/) imagines a near future where the tech bros have “solved” death. When Penny, just a normal woman with a husband and daughter, finds out that she only has months to live, she starts preparing her husband James and her daughter Brenda for what will be coming, including planning her own funeral. At a meeting with a funeral director, he introduces her and James to Forever, a new subscription service that’s like a digital extension of life. “We take a little #poof# chunk of DNA sample, you mail in your loved one’s phone, or in this case your phone, to Forever,” the funeral director explains. “Using the phone and the DNA, Forever will recreate your loved one.. in digital form. They text, e-mail, videochat with you.” And then to demonstrate it, the funeral director calls his late mother through Forever and extols the virtues of it, including being a digital babysitter for his kids. “She can see all the websites they go to.” It’s the new afterlife courtesy of the latest and greatest technology, where all you need is an iPad to continue living with your loved ones even after they die. It’s like they never actually died, never got sick, and never changed— a digital ghost that’s just as good as the real thing if we believe the sales pitch. Or to believe the versions of us that exist in our phones.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cb/fc/cbfcdc7f-aad3-4f92-876f-5cbf3043df76/content/images/2026/10/Image-2.jpeg)

It’s not quite fair to say after her death that the iPad version of Penny “haunts” her family. James, a heavy gamer, just accepts this as the new normal. He’s used to an online life, trash-talking with his gaming friends over headphones while they’re on some kind of online quest/adventure together. Talking to his wife on an iPad isn’t all that different than talking to his friends over his Xbox. It’s Brenda, a wilderness/survivalist influencer, and her partner Terry who have trouble adjusting to this new normal. The new Penny is her mom but it also isn’t— a version of her pulled from dead tissue and the version of herself she curated on her phone. But don’t call Penny or any other person on Forever an iPad; they’ll accuse you of “dehumanizing” them. Do electric ghosts dream of android sheep?

There is a lot happening in this book, many questions asked that Brown leaves unexplored and unanswered. There is actually a way (the wrong way) to read this as pro the idea of this kind of digital immortality. Is it that wrong to not want to say “goodbye” to your loved ones? Brown’s artwork approaches this story (and pretty much all of his comics) with an aloof neutrality toward the virtues of the story. In his older work where he tells the biographies of Andre the Giant or Andy Kaufman, his artwork is a gateway into the story and he builds his biographies through events, actions, and reactions. Shifting here to fiction, his artwork is more of a guide to the story but his simplistic drawing focuses on moving you through the story rather than trying to inform you about the story. It’s not like the art, the coloring, or the lettering are trying to nudge you or overtly influence how you read this story but it creates space for you to explore your own thoughts about a possible digital afterlife.

That visual neutrality takes away one avenue for how we normally read comics. Brown’s minimalistic approach to art— simple lines that define shape and form with some occasional-but-rare visual emotional flourishes thrown in here and there— invites a more surface-level reading of his book, accepting it at face value as a new technology taking over this family’s life, possibly for the better. Forever means that they don’t need to say “goodbye” to their loved one. In that way, it’s almost a slice-of-life book that is centered around a tragedy where James and Brenda adjust to this new life, one accepting it and the other struggling to understand what this new normal means for all of them. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cb/fc/cbfcdc7f-aad3-4f92-876f-5cbf3043df76/content/images/2026/10/Image-1-1.jpeg)

But it’s not that easy or optimistic a story. Brown’s lines and warm colors hide a dystopian story. Since the earliest days of humanity, death has been a real part of our lives. We’re born, we live, we die, we mourn. Now you may believe in some afterlife but in most cases, that is a different existence than what we are experiencing right now. It’s not like Forever is even reincarnation because there’s no bringing the dead back to life. These spiritual, religious, and philosophical thoughts on death aren’t necessarily present in the narrative but they are also never too far outside of the periphery of it. The idea that the living survivors are just some random people— one is a gamer and is used to digital avatars while the other puts forward the image of a rugged and naturalistic survivalist— gives us more room to read into this story than just thinking we can just engage with it on a surface level. 

**Forevr** asks a lot of questions without ever actually voicing these questions in the book. As events unfold and Penny’s story changes from a family story to an exploration of what life and afterlife mean, Brown introduces a 60 Minutes-like exploration of Penny’s afterlife and what it means. It’s a pop-cultural examination of the events of these lives but it introduces the idea that Forever is having a cultural impact. It’s a rewriting of society, an upheaval of thousands of years of how things have been. Forever is tech that disrupts this society who will have to wrestle with from now on.

Brown’s art and lively colors do not look like a dystopian tale but it’s a story of technology fundamentally changing our concept of life. Life is no longer strictly a biological function. Is the post-death version of Penny really a living entity or is it a collection of 0s and 1s that replicate the idea of Penny? In an age of AI, generative slop, deep fakes, and all the different ways that the technocrats want us to believe our lives are better because of them, **Forevr** takes all of this to a logical place— you just know that there are people in front of their computers right now who are furiously trying to accomplish what Brown imagines— but never allows us to lose sight of just how disconcerting all of this could be. If we never have to say “goodbye,” do we ever really learn how to connect to everyone around us that we supposedly love?

Thank you for reading ****From Cover to Cover**. 

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![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cb/fc/cbfcdc7f-aad3-4f92-876f-5cbf3043df76/content/images/2026/10/Image-1.jpeg)