by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
Collects Kill or Be Killed #5-10
(volumes 1 | 2 )
This is one of very few trades – and maybe my first review for one – that I didn’t finish (DNF). Nope. Because I have a lot of great comics waiting on my shelf and who knows if I’m going to die tomorrow. By an extremely boring dude with a terrible haircut and for some dumb reason, a shotgun.
Brubaker and Phillips take Dylan’s once-a-month killing spree to the next logical level – a detective has found obvious similarities between Dylan’s killings and is on his tail. But Detective Lily (one of two flower-named women we meet, who knows, maybe there were more to come!) is ignored by THE PATRIARCHY and must investigate on her own! Maybe it would seem more feminist if Dylan literally didn’t mansplain her entire backstory and motivation for existing like some weird omniscient narrator! Way to take all the fun out of learning who Lily is in the most mansplainy way possible.
Dylan continues to mansplain his way through his killing decisions – an interesting philosophical problem on his hands, for sure, but it would be more interesting if said ethical conundrums came about within the story than being expositioned to death with literal walls of text. The demon character has basically retreated to the background – and understandably sometimes in fantasy, the actual trope is meant as a backdrop for human stories (like Thor, or Walking Dead when it isn’t sexist), but instead the most interesting character is gone. Instead Dylan finds a similarly shallow rebound named Daisy, whose expressions were drawn so bizarrely, and Kira not only changes her hair color Donna in the last season of That 70’s show style, but also explains her backstory to us, in the most boring way possible, you guessed it. Expo-zzz-ition.
If the series really turns around and it is an absolute can’t miss dream of a story, please, leave me a comment and convince me. Otherwise, I have far better things to read. Brubaker and Phillips books will still be in the queue, mind you, sometime. Just not this one.
Reading Art 