Oh no… the traffic jam of the damned!
Creative Staff:
Story: David Avallone
Art: Dave Acosta
Colors: Ellie Wright
Letterer: Taylor Esposito
What They Say:
The Hellish hijinks continue, as Elvira and Faust go deeper and deeper into the Underworld. Will they escape judgment, or does the Lord of the Flies have something special waiting for them? It’s Dante’s Inferno with sex appeal and dirty jokes, in the next exciting issue of ELVIRA: MISTRESS OF THE DARK, brought to you by David Avallone (Bettie Page) and Dave Acosta (Twelve Devils Dancing), the team who brought you Doc Savage: Ring of Fire and Twilight Zone: The Shadow, which maybe you would have read if Elvira had been in them.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Elvira’s journey through hell has been pretty amusing so far and I like how she’s ended up with Glenn as a kind of guide to move her through some of the lower parts to get her to her goal quicker. All it does is make me wonder his true game and how it’ll play out. David Avallone moves us through a few more levels here, skimming a bit along the way, in order to keep us getting closer to our destination and being the right kind of witty along the way, even if it dates it at times because that’s Elvira. Dave Acosta has been fantastic since the beginning and this installment is no exception as we get some great scenes as she handles herself in this environment and we get some pretty weird but still relatively normal environments themselves. It’s not so far beyond the norm and that helps it to fit right.
Seeing the current layer of hell as a traffic jam of the damned is amusing enough but having the people in the cars getting insulted by social media on phones that they can’t not look at is just truly evil. It works well to showcase how bad things are but it narrows down to a particular target or two that I can’t help but laugh at. For Elvira and Glenn, they’re able to cause enough of a distraction to swipe one of the cars – asking the question why nobody else just tries and do the same thing – in order to make it across the place to the next gate. It’s a fun sequence of mild chase material with cops as motorcycles with swords that blends better than you might think it does. It’s weird and wonky and had the right kind of 70s vibe to me in how it played out to give it a bit more roughness.
The next level, Dis, is a nice contrast from all of this because it’s basically the administrative side of hell and that means quieter but filled with a lot more paperwork and desks. It’s comical in how they can basically just push their way through here by looking like they belong – the old carry a clipboard and look important plan – and the jokes work well. It’s not a deep area the book spends a lot of time in and it moves well to getting Elvira on to the next level, skipping over some stuff with a flight on a griffin that helps them really cover some ground – for a cost, of course. All of it is just to get users closer to that end level of hell, though because it is hell and we are dealing with Glenn, I don’t really trust anything here beyond Elvira. And she’s just crackin’ wise the whole way which means it’s a lot of fun.
In Summary:
While it didn’t feel quite as strong as the previous issue, Elvira is getting closer to the goal within hell at least and having a blast the whole way there. We get some amusing nods to a lot of different facets of life and fandom, and the gent that started a lot of storyline as he’s circling the drain that is hell as well, but the book mostly works by the pairing with Glenn and the various demons they deal with at each level, whether they be giant minotaurs or bureaucrats. Avallone and Acosta have a great rhythm here with what they’re doing and it’s definitely a fun installment as it does what it needs to in covering a few more levels.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: July 17th, 2019
MSRP: $3.99
