Chaotic Good: Kiss Me, Satan #1 Review

I would like to start off my review of Kiss Me, Satan by asking a question: why is every urban fantasy hero named like an urban fantasy hero?

Seriously: other than schlub-sounding Harry Dresden (and even his last name brings images of a massive firestorm to mind) and Anita Blake (who sounds like the female lead of a 70s Norman Lear sitcom), every urban fantasy hero sounds like Mom and Dad named them in a fashion that would make them unemployable in profession that didn’t end with a hyphenated “hunter.” There’s Anton Strout’s Simon Canderous, Mark Del Franco’s Connor Grey, and even Matt Wagner’s Kevin Matchstick all sound like the kind of English language music one normally only hears in the roll of 20-sided dice. Seriously: if someone handed you a job application with the name Calliope Reaper-Jones on it, you’d thank her for her interest and call the local bunco squad as soon as she cleared the front door.

Which brings us back to Kiss Me, Satan, and its protagonist: Barnabus Black. Seriously. I mean, that’s the kind of name that you come up with after you settle on an alignment of Chaotic Neutral. Just once I’d like to see a fearless vampire hunter with a stupid sounding name, you know what I mean?

What’s that? Buffy who? Oh. Okay, nevermind.

Welcome to New Orleans, which, we are told by Mr. Black (he must never have worked for Joe Cabot), is a hotspot for werewolves, no matter how many Anne Rice vampire stories you might have read. Black is apparently an angel who followed Lucifer after the fall, but who wants back into Heaven, and is working off his treachery against God one mission at a time, even while hell sends retrieval teams to bring him back there. While Black runs from hell’s hired goons and gets his next assignment from a midget angel, Cassian Steele (“I rolled the perfect lycanthrope crime boss! Now what’s a good name…”), New Orleans’s  lycanthrope crime boss (toldja), has just been told by a coven of witches that his forthcoming son will not be a werewolf. This news means that Steele’s son can never take over the family business (being werewolves, that business apparently being mauling passersby and pissing on fenceposts… and business is good), which causes Steele to whack his second in command to keep the news secret. The witches, being no dummies, realize that they’re probably next on the chew toy list, so they take off, with the werewolves in hot pursuit. Enter Mr. Black, with a couple of Desert Eagles and a lesson in werewolf biology.

On a surface level, if you have read any number of urban fantasy novels, you are going to see a lot of elements that are really familiar in this comic book. Beyond the obligatory badass monster hunter with the badass name (seriously: someday one of these guys is just gonna put on a mask, give himself a code name, and then we can all agree that we’re reading a comic book) and a wisecrack never far from his lips, a town with at least three or four established antagonistic monster races, some concrete rules for dealing with all these monsters that isn’t quite what you’ve read in the classic monster stories (but at least no one here sparkles), and an implied path for redemption for the hero. So at face value, this is a pretty standard urban fantasy story; if you like that kind of thing, there’s a lot of red meat for fans of the genre to dig into.

The most intriguing part of the story that you don’t necessarily see every day is the fallen angel element of the story. Sure, the werewolf stuff with the ascension hierarchy and the simple and bloody “real world” rules about how to deal with them is interesting, but it’s nothing I haven’t seen in the last couple of seasons of True Blood. But the idea of a fallen angel who not only wants back into heaven, but one that operates using real world weapons against what appear to be demons who also need to use real world weapons is at least a little different. And writer Victor Gischler does a decent job teasing just enough information about Black’s background and his situation here on Earth to keep the reader intrigued. Would it maybe have been more effective to keep some information back? Yeah, maybe… but the fact of the matter is that there are enough standard urban fantasy tropes here that it’s probably a good thing to front this info to help set the story a bit apart from the pack (you see what I did there?).

Something else that seems familiar is Juan Ferreyra’s art, in the sense that it kinda reminds me of Simon Bisley’s stuff. Oh, it’s not as heavily stylized and batshit out-there as Bisley’s stuff, but there is an angularity and an almost sketched quality to the faces and bodies he draws. I can particularly see the similarities in Ferreyra’s eyes, which are almost uniformly drawn as deep, shadowed and yet as the focus of every face. His storytelling is generally pretty clear – he draws the werewolves as easily distinct, which can’t be easy to do – but there are one or two problems. Specifically, the opening scene of Black running from the demons plays a little bit fast and loose with where the cars are – there’s a red car that Black runs past, but a blue car seems to reverse direction somewhere in the gutters between two panels. However, I like Bisley’s art, so I’m finding that this stuff is pretty good to my eye.

If you are a fan of urban fantasy – and I mean the good stuff, where there’s someone who kills monsters instead of moping around hoping to get some sugar from the prettiest and most extra special monster – then Kiss Me Satan is a slam dunk. It has everything that you’ve come to expect from those stories, including enough gunplay and bloodshed to keep things on the horror and adventure side of urban fantasy. If you’re not inclined to like urban fantasy, well, there’s an interesting little nugget in Black’s background and relationships with Heaven and Hell, but that’s probably not gonna be enough to convert you to the genre.

There is, however, a sweet panel of Barnabus Black blowing the head off a werewolf from a moving car. He must’ve made one hell of a role against THAC0.