Hell To Pay #5 // Review
Thirty pieces of silver might get you into Hell, but if you’re going to hire the Devil, it’s going to cost quite a bit more, as Sebastian Stone has been quick to discover. The thousands of cursed hellcoins have been a great deal of trouble already, and now his better half, Maia, is drawn to try to save him in Hell To Pay #5. Writer Charles Soule continues his horror fantasy tale with artist Will Sliney. Colorist Rachelle Rosenberg renders some depth and radiance to Soule and Sliney’s dark world.
He floats through the air as a wispy, red torso with something like five arms. His head is a humanoid animal skull on a stalk of tendons. He calls himself Count Sum. He’s some kind of demon. Maia is trying to hire him to get to her husband. It’s easy enough for Count Sum to manage that much. Once Maia gets to her husband, things will be a little more complicated. He’s been chained up. His soul is barely there...just a fluttering ribbon. Before she can get to Count Sum, Maia will have to talk to quite a few other entities and learn a bit more about what’s going on.
Soule has a clever little intro to the issue set in South Africa in 1930. A man looks over a lot of worthless diamonds. An entity known as “Lady Restructuring of the Under-Performing Division” suggests that if the gems are tied to the concept of love, they will be priceless. Soule has some very darkly witty bits of horror lurking around the edges of a very appealing story of love and dark forces. There’s sharp poetry in Soule’s richly articulated dialogue. He might occasionally dip a little too far into the expository dialogue here and there, but Soule continues to craft a captivating story.
Sliney has a deft way of rendering the cool drama of deals being made between mortals and other things. The artist’s REAL talent, however, lies in his rendering of the abstract entities themselves. One would think that variations on skull-to-muscle-and-sinew apparitions would have a limited ability to impact the page, but Sliney finds new and inventive ways to bring a sickly demonic presence to the page in a variety of different forms. Rosenberg gives magic the kind of glowing presence that truly makes it feel magical. She does this while adding hints and highlights that contribute weight and gravity to more earthbound moments of drama as well.
Soule has put down a hell of a lot of story in the first five issues of the series. Given how much has been delivered in the course of the first five issues, it’s kind of surprising that the series hasn’t felt more narratively cramped and crowded as it could have been. Soule gives each moment a great deal of room to breathe, and Sliney’s visuals lend a voluminous weight to everything that makes it feel much bigger than the images on the page.
Grade: A
