The Demon #1 // Review
Jason BLood has looked better. It's got a long, scraggly red beer with a shock of white in it. The same could be said for his hair. Gotham city has been through a lot over the course of the recent past. It's the home to a great deal of madness. The theatricality of life has become quite overwhelming in a city inhabited by masked madness. Adjacent is not there for any of that. He's there about the devils in The Demon #1. Writer/artist James Harren opens-up a whole new chapter on the life of one ofJack Kirby’s most interesting creations.
What's worse: Jason looks like he might be homeless. He's got a bend over his shoulder. He's got a long coat. It's nowhere near the kind of dapper gentleman he had been in the past. Of course, he's fighting bigger demons now and he probably ever has at any other point in the history of his career. But that's up to speculation. Right now is brandishing a pint:. And he's using it to attack him particularly powerful demons. He's got it mounted to an iron rod. There's no logical reason why this should be any kind of a threat to a powerful demon. Of course, magic doesn't necessarily require a whole lot of logic.
To a certain extent it could be said that Harren is merely grafting. The DC comics property onto an idea of it be quite likes. And that's not actually a problem here. Because it is a kind of an appealing idea. And it is remarkably unreliable excursion into the cult margins of the DC universe. It's a lot of fun seeing it. Get put together in a lot of fun seeing exactly where he's going with it. Because there's a lot of interesting angles that he's exploring.
There’s a sort of...Mike Mignola-esque Quality about the art that seems to be borrowing a lot from Hrllnoy in the realm of the visual. However, the artist has found his own distinct voice in and within that style. And so it's fun to watch the Thailicious play out on the page as Blood makes his way through the opening chapter of a whole new life for Blood. There's a weirdness about it that doesn't quite embrace the mundane. And that's kind of a problem. Because there needs to be more of a contrast between the mundane and the mystical in order for it to reall make an impact.
One of the great trewngths of Jack Kirby’s Etrigan is that it CAN be fused with a lot of other different occult horror elements to turn into sometihng drastically different with each iteration while maintaining the central core of a highly adaptable personality. So long as the central idea behind a new Demon series is interesting, everything else should theoretically work out quite well. Given Harren’s overall direction in the first issue, it’s going to be a success. Harren knows how to tell an interesting story. That’s all that’s absolutely needed.
