The Haunting Betrayal At the Heart of A Walk Through Hell
by Brian CroninIn "Reason to be Excited," I spotlight things from modern comics that I think are worth getting excited about. I mean stuff more specific than "this comic is good," ya know? More like a specific bit from a writer or artist that impressed me.
Today, we look at the heartbreaking betrayal at the heart of A Walk Through Hell (spoilers, of course).
Last month, I was chatting a bit with new father Goran Sudzuka about his pick for my 31 Days of Horror feature and we talked a bit about his recently finished maxiseries with writer Garth Ennis and one of the things we discussed was just how important the expressions are in a Garth Ennis comic book, because at the heart of an Ennis work is how these awful situations affect the humanity of the people involved in the stories. In other words, for all the craziness and over-the-top nastiness in a Preacher or a Boys, the main purpose of these events is to see the effect it all has on the humanity of the people involved. Thus, as an artist working with Garth Ennis, you really have to know how to nail some nuance in the facial expressions of people or you're pretty much useless to him. The late Steve Dillon was brilliant at that and I thought Goran lived up to that high bar in his work on Walk Through Hell.
Walk Through Hell (which was written by Ennis, drawn by Sudzuka and colorist Ive Svorcina and lettered by Rob Steen) is an intentionally bleak comic book series. Like, REALLY bleak. In a lot of ways, it makes Ennis' Crossed look positively upbeat in comparison. So if that's not the sort of thing you want to put yourself through, then, by all means, avoid this series. However, I think that there is a lot to appreciate in just how well Ennis sets up the awful events of the series.
Spoilers, of course. The main plot of the series is that the Anti-Christ has arrived and he's here to do even worse things to the world than what has happened in the two thousand or so years since the actual Christ arrived. However, these things have rules and so the Anti-Christ's host body must be killed before the Anti-Christ can inhabit it and it has to be by someone who, on their own will and volition, felt that they were achieving justice by doing it (in other words, some toady of his couldn't do the killing).
The chosen host is a serial killer of children who is too well protected from unseen forces and things get worse when the FBI agents investigating him (Agents Shaw and McGregor) plant evidence in his home that is discovered by the killer (due to his protection from higher forces) and so that effectively makes him immune to FBI prosecution, as they're not on the record as having tried to frame him. Try to bring a guy down with THAT on the record.
So Agent Shaw decides that she's just going to take matters into her own hands...
This, of course, is precisely what was needed to free the Anti-Christ up to take over the body. So now everything's going to be awful and Shaw and McGregor are effectively stuck in hell throughout the entire series.
However, since the story is almost entirely told through flashbacks, we see Shaw often interact with her boss, Agent Driscoll, who is a mentor to Shaw and is the one person who believed in her when Shaw began her investigation into a serial child killer (and who knows what else he does to them) over many states.
Eventually, though, we learn that Driscoll had previously uncovered the conspiracy to protect the killer, but found that people she was close to would have been implicated (not to mention it would destroy her career), so she decided to sit on the information but then essentially manipulate Shaw to the point where she knew Shaw would go off and kill the bastard...
It's such a painful betrayal and it is one that Ennis takes so much time building up to (with the reveal happening in #11) that it is all the more painful when it comes. And obviously, as you can see above, Sudzuka nails all of the emotion built up in all of it.
It's just awful...but awful in a way where you feel it in an impressive, visceral way. It's still an achievement that I think should be honored. Ennis writes some bleak stuff, but he writes it extremely well.
Okay, this feature is a bit less of a reader-interactive one, as I'm just spotlight stuff in modern comics that specifically impressed ME, but heck, if you'd like to send in some suggestions anyways, maybe you and I have the same taste! It's certainly not improbably that something you found cool would be something that I found cool, too, so feel free to send ideas to me at brianc@cbr.com!
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