A little more clarity.
Creative Staff:
Story: Garth Ennis
Art: Goran Sudzuka
Colors: Ive Svorcina
Letterer: Rob Steen
What They Say:
Assistant-Director Driscoll makes the most startling discovery of all: unspeakable horror has not broken loose. Shaw, McGregor and their comrades are not doomed and damned. Hell itself is not about to spill over into our world. Humanity can breathe a collective sigh of relief…just as soon as one last nagging question is answered.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
I still don’t know what to make of this book. Garth Ennis delivered a pretty intense work the last time around as Paul spoke to McGregor and Shaw as he unfurled his past and just how many people and organizations have protected him over the years. It was a chilling piece that we’d seen in other tales before but the scale of it just felt like it was even more intense. This issue is a little more focused on just Driscoll and Goran Sudzuka gets to deal with different parts of her life in a pretty good way, capturing the emotion that she presents as each new discovery and twist causes her to realize just how terrible of a situation she’s in.
The focus on Driscoll has her showing us the reality of the place where so many of the events have unfolded, with the special effects gear there, the drugs, the other pieces that made up the “show” of it all. That it caused so much fear and worked the hallicugenic aspects as well as it did is impressive and Driscoll is definitely unnerved by it, to say the least, even with all that she’s seen over the years in her line of work. All of it serves to push her toward finding out more about Paul and what she learned from that session that he had with Shaw and McGregor, which in turn has her sitting with a former colleague named Tom. Tom’s on the outside on the private side now and that’s giving her some access to other information to help firm up what she knows.
But the reality is that Tom was already a part of this decades-long cover-up and problem and he’s actively trying to warn her away. This adds its own complications as more of it starts to flow out and she realizes what he’s a part of because it also implicates her former a boss, a state attorney no less, and one that she had an active affair with in the past. This brings a lot of new wrinkles to things but it feels like it’s over-complicating a storyline that has already been complicated and pulled at different lengths and directions too much already. Driscoll taking a new turn here to figure out who is behind everything is an angle that I like, and getting an idea of what the real warehouse setup was all about helps too, but for every little answer we get it seems like a slew of new problems arise.
In Summary:
A Walk Through Hell continues to be a book that leaves me the most frustrated with it after reading it. There’s always this sense of some progress to it but then it makes these swerves that has me unsure of where it’s going and how much longer it’s going. I like a lot of pieces of what we’ve gotten over the run and in this installment as well, but as a whole, it still feels like it’s missing something to really bind it all together in a way that just makes it click and work. The parts just aren’t adding up to a solid whole but at the same time I can’t stop reading because I want some closure and finality to it all.
Grade: C
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: April 24th, 2019
MSRP: $3.99
