Gehenna: Naked Aggression #1 // Review
She’s running with a kid. A schoolboy. He isn’t her child. He’s the child of the man who wants her dead. He’s just a kid and maybe he knows that she doesn’t actually want to kill him but she knows that she DOES need a hostage under the circumstances. She’s on the run in Gehenna: Naked Aggression #1 . Writer Patrick Kindlon and artist Maurizio Rosenzweird open a four-part series in a single issue that’s one, long and brutal chase sequence from beginning to end. And judging from the bit written at issue’s end, it’s going to be a constant action tumble through all four issues.
Gehenna has a price on her head. Anyone could tell you that some grade school kid would have a tendency to slow you down if you’re on the run and everything, but it IS going to make it less likely for people to feel comfortable attacking her in a deadly fashion if she’s got a crime lord’s kid kidnapped with her. So she’s in danger, but maybe she’s a bit more safe by putting herself into deeper danger. Or not. She’s improvising a hell of a lot of what she’s doing and it might come back to haunt her later.
Kindlon opens the issue wuth Gehenna’s internal monologue. The improvisation is a big part of the energy that makes the first issue move. There’s also a lot of backstory to get into. Traditional action hero/anti-hero stuff. Nothing terribly new about it, but the script has strong enough forward momentum to be able to make it all come together in a way that’s going to feel quite exhausting in the long-run. Judging from the first issue, it’s going to be a rather long four-issue sprint to the end of the final page.
There’s a real balance between the beautiful and the ugly that Rosenzweig is bringing to the page. The amplified darkness of an urban criminal underworld dominated by guns and violence has been brought to the comics page countless times in countless different ways over the course of the past several decades. Rosenzweig’s distinctive action voice seems to have its own energy. To his credit, he doesn’t bathe page and panel in a heavy darkness that overwhelms everything. THere’s thoughtful detail that inhabits the corners of the panels the contrasts everyday life against the brutal aggression of what Gehenna is dealing with in the foreground.
It’s fun for the first issue anyway. Whether or not it’s going to remain so throughout the final three quarters of the story is going to depend on whether Kindlon an Rosenzweig are going to be able to maintain the momentum in interesting ways that don’t feel particularly repetitious. That’s going to be kind of difficult given the central conflict of the series being what it is. It’s basic survival while the main character is being hunted. It’s not always easy to render a whole lot of modulation in and within the action if it’s going to be one long hunt.
