Creative Staff:
Story: Garth Ennis
Art: Goran Sudzuka
Colors: Ive Svorcina
Letterer: Rob Steen
What They Say:
With the answers they need finally within their grasp, Shaw and McGregor seek a guide to the strange and disturbing world in which they find themselves. But McGregor makes a fateful decision in this quest for understanding, and soon the horrors of his own past are laid bare. And all the while, the clock ticks towards midnight…
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Every installment of A Walk Through Hell fills me with some level of dread. Not because of the horrors of the stories, though those seem to be cruel for the sake of being so at times, but because I’m not sure we’ll get what we need for it all to make sense. The baseline is there to some degree but Garth Ennis is just intent on showing us more depravity, how some overcome it and some because more enmeshed in it, all while dealing with this supernatural side. This one is more focused on the past so Goran Sudzuka doesn’t have to work quite as many of the strange ancient backgrounds to it and it works well as we see some high school material and other points in the past presented, which is a shift from what the last few issues have been about.
The general thrust is that Shaw and MacGregor are in some really bad stuff here and their guide, having told them quite the tale, is now ready to lead them further down the rabbit hole. The reality is that this place is not just ancient but it existed before time itself did, simply waiting for a universe to exist that it could draw from. And draw it does as MacGregor begins to panic after what’s gone down and we see how the twisted insides of this place, one separate from the guide that has been doing all the talking so far, draws him into it. It’s a look into MacGregor’s past that he never shared with anyone and Shaw is quick to panic over it herself, not wanting to be forced to see it and especially because it was not something MacGregor wanted to share himself.
While it ends in both darkness and hope by the final couple of panels, it presents us a tale where MacGregor grew up knowing what he was and being fine with it, but not wanting to reveal his queerness until a time of his choosing. The main bully that he dealt with, Patrick, didn’t have the numbers on his side to succeed since they come from a liberal and empathetic area, and that had MacGregor viewing Patrick as confused himself wanting to help him discover his own queerness so that he wouldn’t struggle. That it takes a number of dark turns, turns that got MacGregor to become an agent in order to help others, leads him back to Patrick again later in life. But like what we saw from the serial killer previously, there are those that are simply dark inside and embrace it, distorting things in a way that makes it hard for “normal” people to comprehend. And when you try to forgive someone like that, it simply opens you up to being viewed as weak and accessible to their darkness, which continues the cycle.
In Summary:
On some level, it still feels like Ennis is writing this to get his own demons out or just to engage in depravity and darkness because it sells on some level. There is appeal in it but when there’s no real meat to what’s going on, an empty string that’s binding it all together so weakly, it feels forced. I continue to struggle with this book because it feels like it should have that magnificent hook that ties it all right and it makes sense as to what’s going on. But the further I get the more I fear it’s going to be a kind of wishy-washy nonsensical piece of pseudo-philosophizing that won’t connect well and it’s going to feel like a waste of time. Yet, I cannot look away…
Grade: C
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: May 29th, 2019
MSRP: $3.99