Malevolent #4 // Review
There are heavily-armed agents in tactical gear. They’re engaging a hostile...but she doesn’t exactly see herself as a hostile...even as she’s slashing into one of them and issuing a spray of blood. It wasn’t always this way. It all started some time ago...with math. It’s a long journey that’s explored in Malevolent #4. Writer Justin Jordan continues a supernatural action horror serial with artist Felipe Sobreiro. Some more of the foundational background on the series is revealed in a dramatic bit of backstory that makes its way to the page in an emotionally-charged fourth issue.
It all happened because she was bored. It was an extremely challenging physics class. But it wasn’t challenging for her. She could do it in her sleep...and for the most part she DID. She wasn’t the only one who was bored. There was someone else. A genius named Jacob Keller who was working on something that seemed a lot more interesting than what they were covering in class. She may not have been the kind of genius he was, but she DID instinctively know what he was getting wrong...and as they worked together...they were able to contact another plane of existence.
Jordan could have easily opted to deliver the contents of the fourth issue in some kind of expository text somewhere in the midst of a few action sequences somewhere in a more traditional series. It takes some guts as a pop fiction writer to get into the intellectual and emotional precursors to a world inhabited by demons from another dimension. One DOES run the risk of losing the audience in and amidst the deeper thematic weeds of exploration and scientific curiosity. It’s not the type of thing that often engages a visually-based narrative art-form all that well. Jordan knows how to deliver the complexity of the backstory without losing track of the need to tell a story that’s visually-based through compelling interpersonal moments and the occasional splash of horror.
Of course, the script for a university-based supernatural drama is only as good as the art that delivers it to the page. Sobreiro’s art lacks a great degree of subtlety. The artist’s heavy inking and over-the-top drama takes a little while to get used to. Once one’s eyes adjust to the exaggeration of it all, the visual reality of Malevolent makes its own kind of sense and actually allows the university-based math drama to feel appropriately fused with the visual.
Jordan and Sobreiro are exploring the world that has its own kind of appeal. While supernatural horror, drama is not exactly unheard of on the comics page, the specific style of the story of that these two men are working on, definitely has its own fingerprint. And though it isn't acquired taste, it's not exactly unappealing. There's a lot going on in the story that seems to be moving into direction of being potentially quite deep thematically. It's just going to take a little while before the full reality of the story you can fully reveal itself.
