So British it hurts—but in a good way.
Creative Staff:
Story: Montynero
Art: Mike Dowling
Letters: Comicraft’s Jimmy Betancourt
What They Say:
Verity: Frustrated artist.
Weasel: Struggling guitarist.
Monty: Rogue media icon.
Three people infected with the G+virus—which gives them incredible powers, but which will kill them in six months! Will they fade away—or go out in a blaze of glory? From the streets of London to the North Atlantic, from muses lost to futures thrown away—Death Sentence is the jaw-dropping next step in superpowered storytelling! Funny, fearless and frightening, this collection of the hit series is an unforgettable comics debut.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
It would be incredibly easy to stay on this surface with this graphic novel. There’s plenty of sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll, and inventive depravity that would make the Marquis de Sade sit up and applaud. For goodness’ sake, the antagonist uses his psychic powers to shag the Queen mum! The surface is certainly fun and uniquely British in tone, but underneath that is a core theme of art and power, sex and expression that elevates this beyond the brash and makes it more than just a flash-in-the-pan story.
The history of literature is, in some ways, the history of syphilis. Seriously, go and check out the history of famous authors and you’ll find that many of them had the disease. Moreover, many of them wrote some of their best work under its influence. The G+ virus isn’t syphilis, but it might as well be. It’s a sexually-transmitted disease that grants its victims superpowers and a six month lifespan. Interestingly, the virus seems to thrive within artists and other creative people. It fosters connections in the brain, facilitating the creation of new neural pathways, leading to new ways of looking at the world and seeing patterns and connections that only the genius and the insane can make.
Unfortunately, one of the people infected with the virus is Monty, a shock comedian whose life is so empty that he searches for new and more inventive depravities to fill the void. His power grows exponentially to the point where he takes over London and threatens the entire world. The other superpowers try their best to stop him with conventional warfare tactics, but a rogue element in the British military hope to use two other G+ infected, Verity and Weasel, to fight fire with fire, so to speak.
There’s a manic energy to this story that made it great fun to read, along with a uniquely British tone. It reminds me of some of the early work of Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, and Jamie Delano: it’s political, irreverent, scatological and blasphemous, but still human at its core. It may seem to celebrate anarchy and the body, but it does so to celebrate humanity—it seems to say that to be fully human, we have to acknowledge and love the profane and the sacred in ourselves.
And all of this is tied in with art. Good art goes everywhere. It shines light on what makes us proud and ashamed. Shakespeare called humans that “paragon of animals” and if you can accept that then you’ll see that the crudity has a purpose beyond the shock value (although that is certainly an element in this work).
In Summary:
Death Sentence is big, bold, brash, and punk in a way that only a British writer could pull off. It’s full of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, but also full of genuine humanity. If you are a fan of British comics and especially loved the early stuff that Vertigo was publishing in the ‘80s then this is definitely for you. Recommended.
Grade: A
Age Rating: Suggested for mature readers
Released By: Titan Comics
Release Date: July 22nd, 2014
MSRP: $22.99
