Hell to Pay #6 // Review
Aamir Bhutto has collected vast piles of gold straight from the bowels of Hell. He will use it to try to get to the Devil. It could take a while. There’s a whole lot of infrastructure between the devils he knows and the big guy in charge. Deals will have to be made. Maia and Sebastian are caught in the middle of it all in Hell to Pay #6. Writer Charles Soule concludes the first part of his Shrouded College series with some rather nice art by Will Sliney. Color is summoned to the artwork by Rachelle Rosenberg.
A floating torso of a demon referred Mr. Bhutto to Baroness Balloon Payment. He’ll have to talk to the Count of Accounts before he can finally get ahold of the Devil himself, but what is he going to do when he gets there? He may have a lot of the Devil’s money, but it IS the Devil’s money. He hasn’t really got a whole lot of leverage to actually ask for everything. Meanwhile, Maia and Sebastian are dealing with demonic activity of a different sort for the Shrouded College. It’s all connected, though. There’s no telling what might happen at the end of it all.
Soule walks a fine line as he works his way through a contemporary urban horror story that needs to be true to the current world while also managing to seem somehow consequential to the world of the series. Aamir will ask the Devil for things to be different, but the names of all the minor demons will tell you: they’ve been working for ages to try to set-up the current financial system. The final issue of Soule’s initial book of the Shrouded College seems to be focused on explaining the strange spectral economy at the heart of human misery. The drama is well-conceived and smartly written. It’s not inherently a visual adventure, though. It is largely a psychological horror-based political satire; it wouldn’t look like much on the page were it not for some very impressive visuals by Sliney and Rosenberg. The Devil has been given countless different incarnations over the years.
Sliney comes up with a truly new vision of the Devil. Throughout the series, Sliney’s demons have felt fresh and novel. Rather than taking on traditional horn-and-tail-and-scale iconography, Sliney seems to be pulling something straight out of another more vicious realm that doesn’t necessarily make sense in our own...but has to look like something when it arrives here. Weird things juxtapose against weird things. Some of it looks human. Some of it doesn’t. It’s a demon, and it’s aesthetically disturbing without looking like something with a rubbery mask that might show up at a Halloween party.
The interplay between capitalism and the realm of the devils is a fun one to explore. Soule casts a pretty stern glance into the overlay between money and misery without going into a great amount of detail. It might be interesting to see him explore that in a bit more depth, but he has other places to be with the Shrouded College, and the next series is about vampires in space. So...y’know...I’m sure there will be depth there as it’s connected to Hell to Pay, but he’s clearly going to be exploring other themes with the next series.
