Review: Darkness Visible #3

April 5, 2017

By Jonathan Edwards

This was an odd direction to go with the third issue. We'd just finished setting the stage for Daniel Aston's story to really kick off. But now, instead of doing that, we're being yanked back in time to World War II so we can learn how the Shaitan came to co-exist with humans in modern Britain. It's not like that an inherently bad or uninteresting concept, I just don't see any good reason for doing it now. Especially when there doesn't appear to be any real connection to the main story. It's just "yep, this is how it happened." That being said, it's not a bad issue in and of itself.

Review: Darkness Visible #2

March 15, 2017

By Jonathan Edwards

The first issue of this book left me of two minds. Primarily, I quite enjoyed it. Even the story beats did get somewhat by-the-book, they're at least used to build an interesting world and characters. Alternatively, the story has a fairly strong overtone of social commentary, but it's not entirely evident what that commentary is. With all of the hatred of demons shown by the human characters, you'd think the main issue would be racism. However, the use of the Islamic term "Shaitan" for the demons, describing them as being made up of energy (which one could argue is the real-world equivalent of "smokeless fire"), and someone literally criticizing Muslims on the first page, makes Islamophobia just as likely, if not more, to be the intended target. Of course, it could just as easily be both and then some, rather than one or the other. But, it could also be neither, as the Shaitan are portrayed as not particularly trustworthy and/or benevolent beings. I only bring this up at the beginning of the review because it was still rolling around the back of my mind when I started reading this issue.

There Can Be Only One: IDW Publishing (2/22/17)

February 22, 2017

By Dustin Cabeal

I’ll be honest, I’ve avoiding doing this for IDW because I don’t enjoy the majority of their titles and didn’t want to suffer through them. I figured that this was a good week to go through them all since they had so many new titles and one of those new titles is Highlander, which is where the title of this review derives.