Gehenna in Tokyo // Review
There’s a price on her head. She’s chased it to Japan. She’d only been there once before for the Olympics, but that was during COVID, so she didn’t get out of the Olympic village for long enough to know her way around. She’s going to have to learn quickly in Gehenna in Tokyo. The one-shot sequel to Patrick Kindlon and Rosenzweig’s Gehenna: Naked Aggression is brought to page and panel the writing team of Kindlon and Marco Ferrari with artist Atsuki Yamamoto. It’s a fun one-shot that moves quickly across the page with wit and strikingly charismatic momentum.
“Yakuza,” she says. “They’re just like in the movies.” Of course...that’s not a problem if you’re an action hero, “just like in the movies.” Gehenna has that covered. She’s got the skills that are going to b. able to keep her alive even in the face of a whole bunch of killers bent on killing her. There IS an issue, though. The head guy...the guy in position to have her killed has already called someone every bit as dangerous as she is...a local assassin known as Chizu the Flame Demon. Impressive name. And her abilities are equally impressive.
Kindlon and Ferrari deliver a simple story of elegant brutality. The finer points of well-executed comic book action are lovingly rammed into the page in a well-orchestrated 30 pages or so. The script launches the action right into the pane lfrom the first page and doesn’t really let-up through the final panel. One might think that a lack of resolution at the end of a one-shot would kind of be a problem for it, but it really isn’t There’s no real beginning to the story and so it doesn’t matter tha there really isn’t an end. The overall story is fun enough that it doesn’t have to have one.
Yamamoto’s bears the same kind of elegant brutality that was the hallmark of the original series. Once again, Gehenna is beautiful and deadly without the kind of superhuman grace that is so often given to women assassins in action stories. She tough...and she looks tough. That toughness really sells the story. Tokyo has a grity, shadowy atmosphere that is bathed in screentones that accentuate the action. The rush of events that hit the page are framed with suitably dramatic perspective and heroic angles.
There’s a bit of a jarring contrast between the hearty art style of the original series and the sleeker look of things in this sequel story, but that doesn’t make it any less fun. And it clearly finds its space and its place in a well-executed sequence of events. It might be a bit strange to get a one-shot that seems to pick-up AND leave-off in the middle of the story, it’s a fun, little novelty that playfully engages the imagination. It’s not hard to imagine Gehenna tumbling through danger in every corner of the world. Very cool.
