I Will Be Back
Last year in April, I stayed in Georgia for a couple days, right in the middle of the deep south. I hit up a couple spots and took a bunch of photography. The photograph you first saw when you opened this article was taken in the small town of Cordele, about 66 miles south of Macon and 100 miles north of the border of Florida. In the foreground, there's a billboard I photographed just off Exit 101, right next to a Home Depot. It depicts the classic "Heaven vs. Hell" trope often seen in evangelical messaging. I think what really sells it for me is the unintentional absurdity of this: the poor editing, the zombie stock photos in hell, and the overall shitposty-type feel the billboard has. Despite this, this is a real billboard made completely unironically by a faith-based nonprofit that calls itself "I Will Be Back Soon" that appears to have started in 2012. This isn't their only billboard either: there's others that are just as bizzare. Between Adel and Tifton, there's another string of billboards like this from the same organization that depict numerous situations, namely Jesus as a military commander in a desert and more zombie stuff. You can see the billboards I'm talking about on the website from their billboard.
It also seems that while a majority of their billboards are located in South Georgia, there looks to be some outliers as well. Namely, I saw on Twitter that there was one in Arkansas. Actually more than one, as this blog article says that the photographer took this just before crossing the Mississippi River. So now I want to locate every one of these billboards. I'll update later with my findings.
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