Fire & Ice: When Hell Freezes Over #4 // Review
There are a couple of good friends in Hell. They’re not exactly in Hell together, though. Their separation could be good or it could be bad. Either way it’s a journey into self discovery if either of them are going to be able to make it out. Certainly they are going to be serious concerns. No one‘s going to come out completely unchained in Fire & Ice: When Hell Freezes Over #4. Writer Joanne Starrer and artist David Stephen Byrne continue a fun and appealingly offbeat dramatic comedy worh remarkably appealing characters the fit well witch lb the overall continuity of the current DC Universe.
Beelzebub is giving Tora the option of getting her mother out of hell. All she has to do is serve there in her mother’s place for all of eternity. That’s bony too much to ask, is it? But y’know… how can anyone trust a major demon in hell? Surely there’s going to be some trickery going on of some sort. Maybe not. Maybe it’s just suffering. Meanwhile in Smallville, Gorla Grodd feels the need to confront his sister…but things have gotten kind of complicated for her as she finds herself in a body that is not her own.
Starrer finds real human drama in supernatural circumstances. The challenge with that sort of thing is to lean into the relatable aspects of it. Human experience is amplified to a ridiculously horrifying proportion in ways that illuminate the human experience.Starrer does an impressive job of making things that might not seem call dad down to earth were relatable actually apply to certain universals that are remarkably needed. The story seems to be reaching towards. It’s big final climax. It’s really only a matter of time. However, exactly where things are going to land when the whole story is resolved is a matter of speculation. That’s actually really refreshing given the things of this sort of genre.
Byrne continues to deliver on a simple, clean-lined delivery of action and drama without a whole lot of unnecessary embellishment. It’s an appealing approach that serves Hell as well as it does Smallville. And while this might continue to feel a little bit stiff in places, there are some places where the art is absolutely genius. Particularly where it applies to the insect pod demon Beelzebub. It’s kind of difficult to make an insect to face look expressively sinister but they our team does a really good job of that. And it adds quite a bit of sinister punctuation to an issue that comes from at least a couple of different prominent places. It kind of pulls the whole thing together in the end.
Starrer and company have been working pretty well with a couple of really appealing characters. The extended ensemble seems like a strange mixing match of different social identities. This isn’t a bad thing. It’s just hard to find the pulse of the series. There are central themes that work pretty well. But so much is going on that difficult to bring together. Still, it’s really cool to see this sort of thing attempted. Not quite action. Not quite sure. Not quite comedy. Not quite drama. And yet it’s all of these things. Very cool.
