Death Vigil #2 // Review
Clara Jenkins is sitting in darkness. THere are lights flowing around her. Magicla lights. Little spheres of light. Each one of them contains a memory. Everything else is darkness. Slowly it becomes appearant to Clara just exactly what’s happened. She’s dead. Again. Naturally this is going to be a substantial frustration to her, but thins are only getting strarted for her in Death Vigil #2. Writer/artist Stjepan Šejić continues the second series of his supernatural action horror series with a healthy combination of different elements that feel a bit too bogged-down in past events to be deeply satisfying. It’s all pretty fun nonetheless.
Apart from being dead, there’s a powerful, demonic-looking entity that wants to talk to Clara. And what with it being the case that she’s dead, there isn’t a whole lot that she’s able to do about the situation. The entity in question isn’t there to torment her or anything, but she’s not going to feel all that good about waking-up back into her awareness of the situation. There are things that have hapened in the realm of the living. Everyone that Clara hangs out with is exhausted from the whole situation. And local law enforcement doesn’t quite know what to make of what’s happened...
It’s kind of weird to think that there were only 9 issues prior to this one. Šejić has a hell of a lot of backstory to go through. Thankfully, all of the characters seem generally appealing enough to carry the ponderous weight of all the backstory that led to this particular issue, but there’s still quite a lot of drag from the gravity of everything that has led the series to this particular issue and every panel in the issue seems to be waiting around for the next thing to happen...even as people are having conversations that feel incredibly consequential on some pretty serious levels.
The visual reality that Šejić is bringing to the page carries quite a bit of emotional gravity to it. Everyone in the ensemble is really attractive..and they all manage to look really cool while they’re having the conversations that they’re having, so it really is visually appealing even if it feels like way too much of wwhat’s happening in the issue is...people wtalking about what has already happened. They just look...so cool...talking about things that have already happened, so it’s a lot of fun.
To be fair, this might be a bit of a breather of an issue as a major character has just died again and been resurrected. The second issue is an opportunity for everyone to take stock of what’s just happened before moving forward. The big issue with this might be the fact that there was been A LOT of time between the first series and the second series. The first series of eight issues ended 11 years ago. There’s a tremendous amount of backstory to remind the readers of. There has GOT to be a better way to pace the series, though.
