The Mavrides cover to this issue of ANARCHY COMICS is only related to its lead story in a loose thematic manner, depicting a futuristic armageddon in which humankind has been reduced to the status of cavepeople in the Big City.
Though the story must take place in the 1980s, given that satellite TV is available, the script clearly riffs on the 1950s enthusiasm for atomic-bomb shelters. Crotchety Bud Tuttle is first seen seated in one such bunker, eating from his ten-year supply of granola while waiting to behold "the Big One" via his satellite-dish hookup. However, the only nuclear strikes in the story appear in simulations run at the ironically named "Martin Luther King U.S. Missile Research Lab." Dritz Bodkin, a neighbor to cranky Bud, drives home from the lab, ready to chill out for the weekend.
He does encounter "fallout" of a sort, though, for a bunch of refrigerators come hurtling down upon the freeway where Dritz drives. These weapons of conspicuous consumption are flung by the Breatharyan Liberation Front, a group of emaciated fellows who believe that human beings ought to subsist on air rather than food (a spoof of a real-life group, the "Breatharians," who claimed to be able to subsist for long periods without food intake).
Back at the bunker, Bud is watching signs of the impending Apocalypse on his TV, like this one:
Unfortunately, Dritz, driving with a refrigerator on top of his hood, smashes into Bud's satellite dish. Bud is so busy raging at Dritz that when a garage band begins producing a cacophonous noise, Bud mistakes the racket for air raid sirens and jumps back into the bunker. Dritz, just as panicked, follows, only to find that Bud has locked them in for ten years. For six of those ten years, the two goofs live on water and granola. Then the automatic hatch opens and the two of them make their way to the surface. They find that the Breatharyans have taken power, at least locally, and that as soon as Dritz offers the locals some of his granola, the anti-food people run yelling for cops.
Bud and Dritz fall in with two of the competing TV-preachers seen earlier, Jesus and the Anti-Christ (the one without the thorn-crown and halo), who, along with Mary Magdalene, are also fleeing the cops. Before the cops even show up, though, the Rapture ensues, taking all the believers up to Glory. (Jesus remarks "I'm glad to be rid of those sanctimonious creeps.")
But the Rapture isn't the only game in town. The People's Guard shows up, boasting that they can now establish a "classless society" with all the believers gone. Jesus and the Anti-Christ get into a fistfight, and then two more beings from pagan armageddons, the Midgard Serpent and Siva the Destroyer, get in on the act. Bud and Dritz retreat back to their bunker, taking one cow with them so that they can have milk with their granola.
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