Hellcat #3 // Review
Patsy is in Hell with a plush bunny. It’s cute. It wears a little red bow and everything. It’s telling her that she can leave. She’s done it before. All she has to do is make the decision to do so again. “The devil,” it says, “has always been on your shoulder.” The bunny would know. It’s her ex-lover. Things are weird, and they’re going to get weirder in Hellcat #3. Writer Christopher Cantwell continues a five-issue walk through the shadows with Patsy in an issue rendered from the darkness by artist Alex Lins. Color comes to the page courtesy of K. J. Díaz.
The bunny is possessed by the spirit of Daimon Hellstrom: the Son of Satan. It’s cute, though. And it seems to know a hell of a lot more about Patsy than it’s letting on. She’s been killed, but that won’t stop her from figuring out a little more about who killed her boyfriend Spalding. Her memory is still a strange and ragged patchwork, but she’s beginning to understand things. There are further mysteries, though: why is Blackheart (the son of Mephisto) so...afraid of her? And why does the bunny seem to think she’s so powerful?
Cantwell guides Patsy into a strange corner of the Marvel Universe that rests somewhere between the weird, the horrifying, and the fantastic. Snippets of narrative curl around each other in a delicious, little nonlinear buffet that has felt like a truly enjoyable place to be for the twenty pages or so between the covers. Patsy is admirably resilient as she stares down forces that are way more powerful than she feels. Patsy’s heroism and the jagged fragments of narration come together in a charming package.
Lins walks a fine line between the beautiful heroism of Patsy and the strange horrors lurking around the edges of her world. There is so much power in the margins of the panel in a world that feels suspiciously hostile in every corner. Lins’s careful framing of the drama lends gravity to the mystery that Cantwell is weaving across the page. The dramatic weight of the scenes between Patsy and the adorably plush Son of Satan would be a real challenge for any artist. Lins manages a silent menace in the bunny that is both cute and powerful at the same time. Díaz’s color maintains a pleasantly low level of saturation that coaxes an appealing moodiness to the proceedings.
The amnesiac detective is a really fun trope to explore. It’s not attempted too often, but it’s always notably interesting when it IS...especially with a character who is as immersed in the darkness as Patsy Walker. Cantwell clearly has the series thoughtfully laid out. There are only two issues left to go before the big inevitable resolution. As disappointingly short as the series is, Cantwell’s writing through the third issue suggests that there’s a really sharply satisfying ending coming in late July.
