Good Devils Don’t Play Fair With Evil #1 // Review
There was a total environmental collapse. Lots of death. Lots of famine. There are still a few people alive, though. Of particular note are Bella and Oya. Before everything went down, they were students of the Harmonious Natural Kingdom School of Close Quarters Combat. Now that it’s the end of the world, they’re squaring-off against each other in Good Devils Don’t Play Fair With Evil #1. Writer David Brothers and artist Nick Dragotta fill an en extended issue anthology with three brutal action stories that make a stylishly percussive journey from cover to cover. It might feel a little over-the-top in places, but it’s a fun issue.
Elsewhere after the collapse there is a boxer who finds himself in the ring with a masked woman. Doesn’t figure he’s going to have too much of a problem with the combat as he’s never had mch of a problem with it before. He’s certainly never died from a boxing match. There’s a first time for everything, though. And if he SHOULD happen to end-up in the afterlife, he’s going to want to challenge the strongest man in the Old Testament to a a match. He’s not going to waste any time with it. He’s going to tell the first angel he meets that he wants to fight Samson.
Brothers forges a narrative with fiery conflict burning deep in its heart. Then he does the same again twice more and calls it an anthology. There isn’t a whole lot of time to get to know any of the characters before the violently aggressive conflict sets-in. There’s a deep energy pulsing through the conflicts that feel suitably intense throughout. There may not be a whole lot of nuance in any of Brothers’ stories, but there doens’t need to be. It’s all about aggression.
The manga-inspired art of Dragotta pounds its way acrss the page with some particularly brutal grace. The first story is in black-and-white, but Dragotta manages an immersiveness about the page that radiates directly from the conflict being carried out on the page. It’s too bad that neither heaven nor the Apocalypse really have much of a presence on the page in eitherof hte first couple of narratives. The atmosphere of these stories sis drawn directly from the white hot anger that’s seething through the conflict. That’s not a bad thing...but it fails to live-up to the potential of the premises in question.
There’s something to be said about the purity of thefight-based anthology. It’s all about the combat. There’s really no desire to move into any deeper thematic territory.It’s all a great deal of fun. The over-the-top nature of the characcters and their conflicts really reates its own gravity on the page, but it isn’t enough to make it feel all that memorable beyond the heart of the conflict that restlessly rests in the center of the issue. It could have been more given the premises that the creative team is working with.
