Forever Evil
Jesse Schedeen of IGN gave the first issue an 8.0 out of 10, saying "Regardless of your thoughts on "Trinity War", "Forever Evil" #1 is a solid start to DC's first real event comic of the New 52. It sees [Geoff] Johns diving headlong into a realm that he's succeeded in so often in the past." Schedeen wished that the Crime Syndicate had been featured more "to establish what makes this new take on the Crime Syndicate unique and why they're a greater threat now than they were the many times the Justice League clashed with them in decades past." Newsarama's Richard Gray was more critical, giving the issue a 7 out of 10. Gray felt that Johns trod a very thin line of overloading the story with too many villains and felt it was "immediately evident that reading this book in isolation of what has come before is almost impossible." He concluded that this event "has a familiar feeling to it, and it’s almost like starting over after coming so close to something that felt like a conclusion to two years worth of questions." Meagan Demore of Comic Book Resources gave the issue 3.5 stars out of 5, saying, "In its chilling first issue, "Forever Evil" delivers a solid story rife with Geoff Johns' effective character use and David Finch's stunning artwork. Although the book suffers from confusing timelines and episodic material, its debut shows promise through some exceptionally notable moments and strong visual command. "Forever Evil" #1 paves the way for an interesting new epoch at DC Comics with a concept that will hopefully be just as effective in the tie-ins as it was here."
Forever (2014 TV series)
Dr. Henry Morgan (Ioan Gruffudd) is a New York City medical examiner who studies the dead for criminal cases, and to solve the mystery of his own immortality. Since his first death 200 years ago while trying to free slaves as a doctor aboard a ship in the African slave trade, Henry disappears almost immediately each time he dies and returns to life naked in a nearby body of water. Having also stopped aging, Henry's long life has given him broad knowledge and remarkable observation skills which impress most people he encounters, including New York Police Department Detective Jo Martinez (Alana de la Garza). Only antiquarian, Abe (Judd Hirsch), whom Henry and his now-deceased wife Abigail found as a newborn in a German concentration camp during World War II, knows that he is immortal. Henry is stalked by "Adam", who is also an immortal, and claims to have been alive for around 2,000 years.
The concept for "Forever" came from a conversation between series creator Matt Miller and his five-year-old son about death. After the conversation, Miller began to imagine what life would be like if a person was immortal but everyone else, including that person's own children, were mortals. He created a character who viewed immortality as a curse because of the pain of seeing family and friends die and who would attempt to find a way to end his immortality. That concept informed Miller's decision to make his character a doctor-turned-medical examiner who used his occupation for research into his immortality and Miller's decision to structure the series as a procedural. The details about the character's immortality and his ability and his desire to end it would serve as the series' main story arc.