What I Bought 5/1/2018 - Part 1

That Dr. Strange Favorite Characters post is getting a lot of views, by my standards. At least I haven't been attacked by rabid Strange fans in the comments. Must not have done too badly on it.

The Demon: Hell is Earth #6, by Andrew Constant (writer), Brad Walker (penciler), Andrew Hennessy (inker), Chris Sotomayor (colorist), Tom Napolitano (letterer) - Would have been a bit more Biblical for Belial to use the jawbone of an ass, rather than the rib of a giant wolf. Also, he would have had no shortage of options between Etrigan, Merlin, and Blood, if he could get Jason to be corporeal for long enough to remove it.

Yes, I ended up buying it. I was curious to see how Blood being a spectral being would contribute to Belial's downfall. The answer is, "very little". Etrigan does most of the fighting, with a magic buff from Merlin, and Blood's role is to taunt Etrigan into getting angry enough to overcome his father's magic. The spell is undone, cosmic reset button, bingo bango, everything is back as it was. Except Etrigan is now ruler of Hell.

I suppose if someone did something with that, it might be interesting. What's Etrigan going to do as King of Hell? How is that going to impact life for people on Earth or other worlds? Seriously, send Etrigan to Mogo and let him cause trouble there. Merlin was hiding Excalibur and gave that to Etrigan? Can he claim rule over England now (I'm not clear on Arthurian legends, obviously). I guess there are possibilities, but I don't know that any of them are going to take place. Otherwise, it's an, "OK, so?" A status quo change to no effect. The part that caught my attention the most is Belial paraphrased Kung Fu Panda at one point on page 2 and 3. Which feels like something Etrigan would mock him for if, you know, he hadn't decapitated Belial.

Brad Walker's art is still good, although the fight suffers for Belial being so large. He'd been something similar with Etrigan throughout the series, but more in quieter moments, conversations or the preludes to violence. Belial takes up so much space in the panels things feel cluttered. I wanted Walker to back the view up so we could have a better sense of what's happening. But he was keeping it focused on the two demons, who were the important ones in all this, so it makes sense.

Empowered and Sistah Spooky's High School Hell #4, by Adam Warren (writer), Carla Speed McNeil (artist/letterer), Jenn Manley Lee (colorist) - Glad I ate dinner before I started this review, or I'd have lost my appetite.

The heroes survive a tussle with the food elemental on the cover in the cafeteria, and then are attacked by the 3 J's and their deadly hair in the gymnasium. Bit of a close call both times, but they survive.

I like the flashback to lunchtime at Spooky's school, drawn within a lunch tray. That's just a clever layout. Also, in the flashback to a conversation between Hannah and Theresa, we're seeing part of the conversation as a reflection from a mirror. And when Theresa and Emp were under attack in the girl's room, Spooky saw Hannah in the mirror's reflection as well. I don't know a lot of the backstory of the relationship, but I'm guessing that, while all the popular girls are trying to make Theresa relive the humiliation they put her through in high school, she's really looking back over the ways she feels she screwed up what she had with Hannah. And how the torment these girls put her through contributed to that, the same way it contributed to her hating Emp when they first met (because she assumed Emp was just like all those girls from high school).

And I wonder if any of the evil girls are paying attention to how things are going. They know their classmates are dying obviously, but bringing up Hannah is consistently taking the fight out of Theresa. She was still struggling against Julia - even without being able to muster a spell - until Julia mentioned that Hannah also had blonde hair, which dredged up painful memories. I've mentioned that all these girls are stuck on their high school years, and are making the mistake of thinking Spooky is still that same girl, too. So the taunts and attacks that were so effective then, aren't cutting it now. But there's another, more recent wound that's still open, and they mostly ignore it.

I have to figure that one of the Ashlee's is going to deliberately exploit it sooner or later, and I guess we'll see how that plays out.