I've been reading Ed Brubaker / Sean Phillips comic books for some time now. Almost a decade and a half. And I'd read separate works by each of them before seeing their collaborative work. So I was pretty excited when I heard about Kill or Be Killed coming out. After all, Sleeper, Criminal, Fatale, and The Fade Out had all been good to excellent.
But The Great Escape was sold out of it when I went to pick it up, and there weren't any copies available the next week or two, either, and it was a $3.99 comic book, so I didn't want to buy it new on Comixology (knowing that it would go down at least a buck in another week or two) . . . so I ended up not buying it until it went to the Recently Reduced section of Comixology. And it went down to $1.99, which made me really happy.
But the story itself didn't make me as happy as I wanted it to make me. The art was beautiful 95% of the time, but there were some flubs along the way which I just didn't understand. Was Sean Phillips getting sloppy? I've loved his art since I first laid eyes on it (in 1990), so I didn't want to think that . . . but there was some evidence right before my eyes. And the writing . . . well, the whole demon aspect just rubbed me the wrong way. I felt like I'd seen it at least one two many times.
I wasn't ready to give up on it yet, but I did wait for issue #2 to go to the Recently Reduced section until I bought it. And once again it went to $1.99. And I had the same complaints on #2 as I did on #1. So I decided to just relegate it to my Comixology Recently Reduced list of buys. When issue #4 came along the ending seemed to mitigate the demon aspect of the story a bit, and I felt a little better about the writing. The art continued to have those mysterious flubs, though--especially in terms of heads being drawn out of proportion to bodies, so that there seemed to be several macrocephalics in the cast. At least 5% of the time.
But this morning I read issue #5, and the writing pulled this book up another notch. The story is more violent than I usually put up with, but there are enough good bits to more than balance that out. Enough to make me not even care about the 5% macrocephalic issue, too.
For instance, on the first page of issue#5, Dylan (the lead character) is sitting on a (closed) toilet, masked and holding a shotgun, while he ponders the concept of fate and the necessity of believing in free will. And he decides that we need to believe in free will because 95% of us have shitty lives, and if we believed that that was our fate, that would mean that there was no chance of getting out of the shit, and that would be intolerable. Pretty good, right?
And later on in the issue he starts to take boxing lessons. Not so much to learn how to fight, but to learn how to overcome his fear of being hit, and to train himself to be able to take a punch ("or five" and keep going). More pretty good, right?
And the demon presence is very low this time out. There's only one panel where he (or "he") appears ("appears"--since it's just eyes and some facial lines in the dark).
In fact, I liked this issue so much that I would even be tempted to go full out price for the next issue . . . but it's not available yet. So I guess I might as well wait for the Day Old Bread price. Besides, I'm thinking that I may need to go back and re-read issues 1 through 5. I mean, this is Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips we're talking about.
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