Hell We Fight! #2 // Review
Midori wants to ransom off the captured angel she and her friends had found in the back of an ice cream truck in Hell. (It’s okay...really. Midori had a rough life that’s outlined in the first few pages of the issue, but her friends TOTALLY wouldn’t let her profit off of the misfortune of an angel or anything like that.) Things continue to get complicated with the entire cast as writer John Layman and artist Jok continue the horror fantasy comedy In Hell We Fight! The second issue delves a bit more into a strangely engaging Hell and some of the characters who inhabit it.
The angel’s name is Angel. She’s not terribly happy. She knows that things haven’t gone well for her. What’s worse: the people who have found her and ostensibly saved her from the back of an ice cream truck might actually turn out to be worse than the people who kidnapped her...but in a completely different way. They’re all nice enough to introduce themselves to her and show her around their place, but they don’t seem to be entirely together, and there’s no telling what they might accidentally do to her. This is Hell. Anything could happen.
Layman rides a pretty fine line between lighthearted situation comedy and something altogether darker. The strange collection of the damned is populated by some people with some very, very horrific pasts. They’re all deeply damaged in different ways that make them all endearing in different ways. The addition of Angel allows for a more dynamic member of the ensemble who might be allowed a bit more of a character arc that will see her adapting to the Hell that has become home for all of the rest of the characters in the ensemble. Above all, Layman’s dialogue and situations are genuinely funny, which is kind of difficult to manage with all the cliches that might otherwise haunt a Hell-based comedy.
The aggressively playful squiggles of Jok’s art continue to grow with Layman’s emerging story. It’s a cuddly kind of Hell, but it’s also a pleasantly sketchy one. There’s bound to be gore and sinister elements on the page, but it’s never going to be anything other than playful. And though there ARE elements of cuteness in and around the edges of the action, there’s a coolness to the sketchy rendering that keeps it from being too cute to lay down a little bit of menace here and there to amp up the suspense and impending action that move the story forward.
Layman and Jok are working with a very large and diverse ensemble of characters who seem to be well-articulated and equally well-rendered on the page. The challenge moving forward is going to lie in maintaining the right balance of weird comic energy and deeper emotional drama while still keeping a firm grasp on each of the characters and everyone involved in the action. Judging from the first couple of issues, the overall integrity of the series is in good hands with Layman and Jok.
