Everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
Creative Staff:
Story: Brain Buccellato
Art: Hayden Sherman
Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
What They Say:
Mitchell Moss is about as regular as it gets. He’s married with two children, and co-owns a successful chain of Memphis Hot Chicken restaurants. It’s not the life that screams hero/vigilante…until he discovers that his business partner is in bed with the mob and owes them $2 million. Unfortunately, Mitch is ill-equipped to be a badass—he’s just a guy who makes really good chicken. Can he protect his family from cold-blooded gangsters? Absolutely not.
But maybe the CHICKEN DEVIL can…
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Sometimes a name or a cover can draw you into something just as much as it repels you. Chicken Devil is certainly a thing and I totally understand what it’s doing and where it’s going. I’ve read a bunch of Brian Buccellato’s work over the years, from his Flash days to the run on Injustice, so I was curious to see where he’d go with an original work. This one is a bit convoluted in its opening execution while trying to lean into the crazy hectic aspect of it all. Hayden Sherman has wowed me on several titles in the last few years so getting a chance to see more of his kinetic artwork definitely excites me. With this property, it feels like with the story and artwork it’s like Crank meets Falling Down with a chicken mask thrown in for good measure.
The premise introduces us to Mitch, a husband and father who is pulled in a lot of different directions from that alone but he also runs a successful fast-food chicken chain with a special secret sauce. We see him managing the home life well enough but that there’s real tension and problems that exist here. That’s only going to grow when he’s called into work because of a fire that happened there, destroying some product and costumes. What he doesn’t quite understand is that his friend and partner in Antonio here basically was working with a group of drug runners that were using the chicken buckets to smuggle in heroin through the bottoms. Mitch was unaware but the bad guys have come to collect their due and it turns into a bad situation all around. It’s only thanks to a little luck that he’s able to get his family the yacht that Antonio was talking about so they can get to some safety.
At least he thought so, as the yacht blows up while he goes to figure out more of what’s going on and tries to protect himself. The sudden loss of his family on top of everything else going on is going to push him into some dark territory, which is where it’ll go next time I’m sure, but what we see of him here he’s still stumbling through all the things in a bad way now. When he goes to one of the locations to check on things, he hides his identity to get in by wearing one of the masks, but that just gets the local tough guy watching the place to threaten him all the more when he’s caught up. But again, bad luck follows Mitch all around but it also impacts other people. That, in the end, just sets him on an even more dangerous path even though it’s also what keeps him alive.
In Summary:
There’s a lot of fun to be had in this and plenty of places it can go, if this kind of material is for you. It reminds me heavily of the drug-infused Crank film with its distorted sense of time and continuity but blended with Falling Down, though that’s more to come in the next installment as our lead takes more control of his destiny. Buccellato’s script moves nicely here even if it feels just a bit clunky early on until things feel like they firm up more. It helps a lot that Hayden Sherman’s artwork is so dynamic and forward-moving in how it feels and flows so that we get something here that definitely has a lot of energy to it. I’m definitely curious to see where this will go in the end, but it’s really going to be a journey to get there.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: October 6th, 2021
MSRP: $4.99
