'Midnight Gospel' Netflix: An amazing 'Adventure Time' follow-up

Pendleton Ward, who created “Adventure Time With Finn and Jake,” has a new cartoon, “The Midnight Gospel,” made in collaboration with the comedian Duncan Trussell, and it is an ambitious, extraordinary, dreadful, beautiful thing. Through the offices of his deteriorating computer, Clancy virtually travels to different worlds where he conducts interviews for his little-heard “spacecast.” He has an unseen sister whose calls he avoids and a mop-haired little dog named Charlotte; the fur on Charlotte’s stomach parts to reveal a portal to a void into which the dog sometimes sucks things. Visually, “The Midnight Gospel” is reminiscent of Ward’s previous series, yet it has its own style, beginning where “Adventure Time” gets surrealist and psychedelic and heading on from there. The guest in the penultimate episode, animated as the Grim Reaper, is “death positive” mortician and author Caitlin Doughty, weighing in against our fear of corpses; the season’s final interview subject is Trussell’s own late mother, Deneen Fendig, a bright light dying, though clearly not dying out, from cancer.