Written by Rob Liefeld and Mark Poulton
Illustrated by Owen Gieni“DEVIL IN THE FLESH,” Part One The legendary fallen angel returns to comics. As New York City’s sins are covered with a fresh blanket of snow, the psychotic serial killer, Torment, is hard at work creating new ones. Meanwhile, Avengelyne has her hands full with the Red Dragon who has taken a human vessel in search of a new apprentice. Who has the Dragon chosen as his vessel and does it have anything to do with Avengelyne’s new look? All this plus the introduction of the stunning, Heaven Starr!
I missed out on previous volumes of Rob Liefeld’s Avengelyne. In fact, I hadn’t even heard of it until it was first announced that the series was coming to Image. I know some people would just toss such a team/concept out of their consideration without a second’s thought, but I try my best to give new series (hey, it’s a #1, it’s technically new!) a chance – especially when it’s from Image Comics. Was my willingness to leap into the unknown rewarded, or should I have stayed away from this one? Follow the cut and see.
Let’s cut to the chase. There are problems with this comic. As this is a new number one of an already existing series, writers Rob Liefeld and Mark Poulton have a tough decision to make (though I’m not sure where things fall on the Liefeld:Poulton decision-making scale): do they make a comic that picks up where the previous one left off, ignoring the number on the cover, or do they make their new volume accessible to new readers? As much as I harp on why comics should be accessible, I can understand choosing to go with the former; take, for example, Grant Morrison’s Invisibles, which renumbered twice. Liefeld and Poulton, though, try to do both at once, and… well, it doesn’t work. By putting Avengelyne in a new body and giving her temporary amnesia (people still use this as a plot device?), the pair seem to be trying to make it easy for anyone to jump in, but as soon as the character’s true nature is revealed things get to a point where I, a newbie, had next to no clue what was going on. Obviously, I can’t make too much of a judgment on that alone, just as I wouldn’t judge the first issue of volume two of The Invisibles for being inaccessible, but it isn’t supposed to be particularly accessible without the first volume. The fact that Liefeld and Poulton are honestly trying to do the opposite here makes it that much worse.
All that aside, the writing just isn’t good. The dialogue is the main criminal, here. There’s far too much speaking thoughts aloud — sure, it may be a comic book standard, but it’s a standard that has to go. Captions have caught on as the primary method of conveying internal narrative. Use them. It doesn’t help matters that said thoughts don’t sound at all like anything anyone would either say or think, and neither does the majority of the dialogue. The worst instance is where our heroine’s roommate tries to remind her of who she is by giving a succinct synopsis of how they met. I don’t care if you’re talking about or to an amnesiac, nobody talks like that. Add in scenes that are just indecipherable — seriously, what happened during that encounter with the three horsemen? — and the previously mentioned accessibility issues, and you have a comic that Liefeld and Poulton just don’t want me to read.
The art isn’t half bad. I mean that in the most literal sense. The backgrounds are very lush and well-done, including both the line work and (especially) the colors. The problem is the people. The same care and delicacy that is presumably given to the settings of Owen Gieni’s pages are lacking from his figures. Now, I’ll admit that my main beef with Gieni is his method of stylization. Style is tricky. When it comes to a highly stylized artist, “quality” is more a matter of subjectivity than when talking about artists that draw in a more “realistic” style (though standard rules still apply). That being said, whether or not you like Gieni’s style, his people simply don’t seem to fit in the world that he is given them. If you’re going to stylize your figures, you should — but don’t necessarily have to, if you’re an expert — similarly stylize your backgrounds. If you don’t, you might end up with something that looks almost as ill-fitting as cutting and pasting a Looney Tune onto a photograph. Unfortunately, Gieni is cutting it pretty close on that scale of “almost” to “completely.”
Of course, there’s one thing that’s going to bother people more than the actual quality of the writing and illustrating (myself included). I’m a middle-class white male. As such, I always find it difficult to talk about discrimination of any kind without feeling a bit hypocritical. Still, whatever kind of version of the “empowered female” that Liefeld and Poulton are trying to present here… well, it ‘aint working. Perhaps they missed the lesson that Kate Beaton and friends taught with their Strong Female Characters, but a former porn star/stripper beating up her former drug-dealing for boyfriend while still being presented in a way for men to drool over does not darlings of the feminist movement make. I’ve seen many, many things that are significantly more sexist, but they’re (usually) deliberately so. The fact that Liefeld and Poulton are honestly trying to do the opposite here makes it that much wo–waitaminute.
Final Verdict: 2.0 – 
