The chaos of Belial is about to spill out into the world.
Creative Staff:
Story: Andrew Constant
Art: Brad Walker, Andrew Hennessy
Colors: Chris Sotomayor
Letterer: Tom Napolitano
What They Say:
After a physically and emotionally draining journey, Etrigan and his companions begin their siege on Death Valley’s dimensional tear to Hell. The bloody and epic battle against Hell’s armies! Will our heroes succeed in stopping all of Earth from being transformed? Or will a surprise addition to Hell’s forces tip the battle in evil’s favor?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
As we hit the penultimate installment of The Demon: Hell is Earth, Andrew Constant moves us through the last phase of events as the final battle is ready to play out. While this is a decidedly familiar structure to work with, Constant moves in enough character moments to carry it combined with Brad Walker and Andrew Hennessey going as big as they can with the action. Though some of the layouts don’t quite click for me and it feels almost a bit too busy, it’s a big rush to see the group come together to fight and make some real progress here. The flow of it is strong even if the beats are familiar. If anything, my only complaint once again is the lettering that Tom Napolitano has to use for the demonic side, a maroon background with hard to read script in addition to Etrigan’s own already problematic font. It really is elements like this that, though no fault of Napolitano as they’re how DC sets these things up, usually does keep me away from Etrigan involved books.
When it comes to Blood and his group, there’s some good stuff early on as Merlin tries to play down what could go wrong if they fail in dealing with Belial because he doesn’t even want to think about that. He’s been so used at this point with what’s going on that you can see the frustrating so clearly. Xanadu and Blood are simply looking to know more of what’s at stake but it just feels weirdly placed considering what’s going on in front of them. What helps is that Etrigan does come back to work with them again, having calmed down some, and this allows them to work together to go after the demon horde that’s out there. Walker and Hennessey bring this to life really well with some great fight moments and I love how Blood handles himself amid all of this. And while Xanadu’s verbal pushback moment is standard comic fare, it really did feel out of place as it’s trying to place human issues onto demonkind. I get the intent but it felt like a wrong place kind of moment.
A decent chunk of the book is given over to Belial himself and others from Hell as we see how he’s tormenting Lucifer and just biding his time as the final elements come into place that will change everything. There’s the usual boisterous moments and it’s fun watching him as confident as he is because you know that it’s not going to pan out. What we do see from this angle is one of Etrigan’s uncles who has taken on more power because of Belial and his long distaste for his nephew, something that many of those in hell share. That’s boosted him up nicely and making for a more challenging match for Etrigan, but that’s also standard fare. It’s simply really nicely executed with how it unfolds, giving us a visually delightful scene and seeing Etrigan having to really work at it a bit until we can get to Belial himself.
In Summary:
The Demon continues to be a fun book overall here but it’s got two thigns that are still frustrating me. The first is the lettering, which is a seemingly decades-long mandata for Hellish characters to be presented this way, that makes portions of the book almost unreadable to me. The other is that I really think this should have been a four-issue series and I wish publishers would return to that length for some of these things instead of six months, both because of the commitment and because it’s hard to sustain simpler stories that make up these series across six issues with the familiar structure. Constand is keeping it fun and enjoyable but this was almost a placeholder issue overall to get us to the finale as there’s little new here and it’s mostly action. Which is fun and fine but I think it would have flowed better as a whole if the project was tighter in length.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 12+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: March 28th, 2018
MSRP: $2.99
