Boom! Studios 2019
Written by Brian Azzarello
Illustrated by Maria Llovet
Lettered by AndWorldDesign
For Mature Readers’ Only
All those little shadows and shapes that Faith catches at the peripheral of her vision start to take shape. There are omens. These events and details have Faith unsettled, but she moves past them with her attention drawn to something new: the Devil.
I am in love with this damn crazy story. I have no idea what’s really going on and why all this madness is happening to Faith but I have to say she is letting go of the control of her life and she’s going to suffer the consequences. Also the sheer fact that Faith can do what she can is kind of awesome and weird and makes the reader wonder who is really responsible for what is happening around her. It’s a little bit funny, this feeling inside, I'm not one of those who can easily hide and yet Faith lost control last night and in front of her new girlfriend.
In the first issue we saw that perhaps this girl was not human that cliffhanger ending said it all. So now I have so much running through my mind about the story, it’s characters, what’s real and what isn’t. In fact that there’s so much happening at once inside there it feels like the laptop when it slows and crashes because you’ve too many tabs open. The strength of the writing here is far and away the best thing I think I have ever seen from Brian and considering his resume to date that’s saying something. I mean the way that this is being told engages the readers’ in ways that just grab you and take so far beyond what’s on the page that their imagination comes into play. That the story can envelope the reader as it does shows skill, talent and that innate knowledge of how to connect with the audience on levels that they, the audience, isn’t even aware is possible.
I am in love with the interiors here. Though I mean while we see basically a porn scene and with amount of her hair down there that we see, we could’ve seen how impressive he was at some point. The linework is gorgeous and I love that it’s not rigid but more like the natural flow of the hand on the page. It adds a certain something that isn’t easy to describe but you feel it. There is also some very nice attention to detail going on here that merges itself with this imagination and creativity to create some incredibly wow moments. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show off a great eye for storytelling. The backgrounds we see are marvellous as they expand the moments and bring a sense of size and scope. The colour work too is great the way it’s utilised to create this mood, tone and feel is sensational.
Brian manages to capture the life of Faith and how all these seemingly random occurrences are actually related. From the homeless woman, which by the way is one of the most amazingly bizarre scenes I have been honoured to see, to that sixth sense to that unexpected sex scene every last thing here feels like it’s the interconnectedness of it all. It is almost as if her the environment is a result of her own indecisive nature and all her doubts and fears combine with hopes and wants to twist it all into something unrecognisable.
That Brian makes us think, that he engages the readers’ mind and imagination in trying to figure out what the hell is going on is one of the best things about reading his work. This whole thing is bloody brilliant in ways that are both obvious and subtle. These folks are putting out one the absolute best books out there right now.