Chicken Devils #4 // Review
She wants her dad to kill her ex-boyfriend. He had almost accidentally done it before. All she’s asking is that he finish the job. He’s not going to kill him, though. She knows this. That’s why she’s threatening to snitch on him. It's not going to work in Chicken Devils #4. Writer Brian Buccellato and artist Mattia Monaco continue their earthbound crime drama with cleverly-executed scenes that take the often romanticized world of crime and punishment and look at it through the eyes of very relatable people who are just trying to get by. The family drama continues to be quite compelling.
He’s perfectly calm. She’s understandably upset. He’s her father. He needs to be calm. Her mother, on the other hand...well...as he is quick to point out, they made it 16 years without hitting her. That’s a pretty good record. The damage is done, though. The family is in deep turmoil. And then there’s work. His work will be a bit of a challenge. He knows that he can’t continue to do the work that he does. It’s tearing apart his family, and there’s no question that he wants out. Getting out is going to be very, very difficult as he is quick to find out.
Buccellato puts challenging scenes together and simply...allows them to play out at their own speed. It’s very admirable and remarkably patient for any writer to simply...allow their characters the time they need to really live. The opening scene involves so much intensity of emotion. It’s uncomfortable and tense. It’s a major moment that hits its climax in a single slap. The emotional reverberations of that single slap would have been nothing if Buccellato hadn’t allowed that scene a hell of a lot of room to breathe.
Monaco is a clever storyteller. The layouts are sharp and nuanced. Tense moments play out in close-up. Stillness accompanies silence on the page. Angles are skewed ever so slightly to indicate delicate dramatic imbalances. A conversation driven by the young son is viewed from a child’s low-angle visual perspective. Physical violence is disorienting and brutal. Monaco’s colors add depth and tone to every setting. Each scene takes place in a cluttered, little space of some sort. The locations seem remarkably lived in. It all feels so very, very organic, which amplifies the street-level day-to-day drama that animates everything in the series.
The seriousness of the drama really hits at the end of the issue. The story ends with the fifth issue. Things have gotten out of control. And yet everything still feels so static and isolated. It’s a very nuanced and complicated drama. The physical action is really only there to amplify it in various directions. Buccellato and Monaco have something interesting in the series. It’s the type of story that could easily be made as an indie drama or a one-season streaming series. Presenting it in comic book format lends a remarkably vivid quality to it that no other format could do justice to.
