I was geared up for a Garth Ennis war comic, but A Walk Through Hell is a supernatural horror police procedural; FBI agents are the leads (so far), but still. And it’s very modern; it opens with an active shooter situation at a mall at Christmastime, there are tweets, one of the characters bitches about Trump. It’s very interested in acknowledging as many zeitgeists as possible, which, again, I wasn’t expecting.
It’s okay supernatural horror police (FBI) procedural. Feels a lot like it’s an Avatar comic, not an AfterShock. Specifically, it feels a lot like Alan Moore’s The Courtyard and I’m really hoping that feeling goes away; I don’t want to see Ennis aping Moore.
Goran Sudžuka does the art, which is good. He paces it well, has a good amount of detail; the issue opens with foreboding narration from one of the leads, which repeats and expands at the end, as we find out something’s going very wrong.
But there’s not much to it so far. It’s sensational and exploitative, but there’s no meat yet. All of Ennis’s devices work to engage the reader in things besides the story, because the story’s going to start next issue. This issue’s the prologue, though also not a great one on those terms because the characters aren’t established yet. It’s not the traditional Ennis male and female cop team though; those usually involve the guy being incompetent and the lady being badass. He’s not going that route. There’s also not a lot of humor, just impending doom.
We’ll see. It’s a terrible time to be reading this comic for numerous reasons but… there’s never going to be a good time to read a comic with this content.
I vaguely remember the characters’ names—the narrator mentions them in the opening narration, but since it’s set against someone else’s horrific experiences, they don’t click. Though at least one of them is hard to spell, I remember. Lots of Zs. I don’t know. I was expecting some WWII comic, not a ripped from the bloody headlines.
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