Congratulations! You’re dead. Maybe you lived a rich, full life and died in bed surrounded by your family. Maybe you lived fast, died young and left a beautiful corpse. Maybe your last words were “Hold my beer” and now you’re being mocked on an unspecified internet messageboard. Who knows? Doesn’t matter.
And now comes the next bit - Death is coming to you in person/anthropomorphic entity/other form to collect you and usher you along to the next plane of existence. But in a surprise twist, you have the option of selecting which fictional representation of Death it will be.
Maybe it’s Sandman’s kindly Goth chick, or Discworld’s skeleton and scythe appearing astride his horse Binky.
Maybe it’s a Death you can defeat in a game of some sort such as Bergman’s, Bill and Ted’s, or Keith from Smax.
Maybe it’s the chatty one with the giant eyeball and party hat from The Midnight Gospel or even the one that looks like Brad Pitt (and if you get that reference, be glad you’re dead and will never see that film again).
There have been so many different literary and filmed iterations of Death - some kind, some cruel, some indifferent, some just plain weird. But now’s your chance to choose.
I can’t decide, myself. Either I would want a kindly Death such as Gaiman’s to help me adjust, or something epic. Maybe Dennis from Smax who handles the big awesome deaths (not Keith - Keith is lame and keeps losing at chess to peasants).
I did suspect that Gaiman and Pratchett were going to feature heavily here, but I’m sure there are others of interest.
Not that I’m endorsing any of these, but other candidates include the Marvel comics version (who also manifests as a young woman), the Piers Anthony one from Incarnations of Immortality, or the Black Rabbit of Inle.
