“Hell Yeah” is kind of a weird comic. It has a superhero premise, sure, but these past four issues it’s played out more like a parallel worlds story that happens to have some superheroes in it. It also makes a lot of nods toward hipster culture, taking place in Portland and setting at its forefront the schemes of a badass girl band. It seems like Keatinge and Szymanowicz have been concentrating on combining different stylistic conventions more than anything, and the result is an inconsistent comic. Looking back on this various and slightly confusing arc now that it’s come to an end, is the trade worth a shot or (forgive me for this one) hell no?
Written by Joe Keatinge
Illustrated by Andre Szymanowicz“LAST DAY ON EARTHS,” Conclusion
Benjamin Day lays dying as HELL YEAH’s first storyline comes to its bloody end! Secrets blowing out of issue one, page one finally come full circle as the truth behind who Ben really is, who’s trying to kill him and what this book is actually about all come to a head. This is creator-owned, so when we say nothing will ever be the same again, we’re not screwing around!
In Ben’s world, superheroes are a relatively recent phenomenon. Apparently hailing from another world entirely, they stepped in and fixed a lot of problems. But Ben, vitally connected to the superhero world and gifted with a couple powers of his own, can’t seem to keep his life together and is on the point of being kicked out of university. That’s when things get sort of weird: Val, a girl from a parallel universe, shows up and informs him that all other versions of him throughout the universes are being killed.
Like a lot of multiple universe stories this series can be hard to follow, and this chapter is no exception. Staged around a couple of big reveals but holding back a lot of important details, it took this reviewer a couple of rereads to be sure of what was going on and why. It’s not that this story is particularly dense or confusing; it’s being told in a particularly dense and confusing way, hopping from universe to universe and circumstance to circumstance without ever trying to give the reader a sense of context. I mean, you all remember the show Sliders, right? It was always frustrating to watch because it would take the main characters about ten minutes longer than you to figure out what kind of universe they had jumped in to. (“OH, it’s an Earth where the MEN are oppressed!”) “Hell Yeah” has the opposite problem, and the obscurity isn’t being played for any particular effect.
In terms of plot this issue plays out like an origin story, showing how Ben is being pushed into a particular — well, let’s call it mode of life. And as the culmination of an origin story, it works well enough. While there’s not quite enough motivation on the part of his character (besides seeing Val go through a lot of crap in order to protect him) to make his concluding change believable, the whiff of a conspiracy as he is detained and then hidden from our view for a certain period of time does fill in the gaps. The storyline opening up at this issue’s conclusion shows a lot of promise if only because these five issues have functioned as a prologue, providing the necessary context and establishing the necessary gaps in information. The frustrating thing is that it has taken five issues to get to this point — couldn’t a single-issue prologue have served the same purpose?
The art is probably the best thing about this series. It’s got a strong nineties feel, with Szymanowicz’s bold lines (inked by Fabio Redivo) setting off Jason Lewis’s bright colours. Douglas E. Sherwood’s letters sell the whole thing with their unmistakeably retro look. There are some more modern-looking pages in this issue, however, in accordance with the odd mishmash in tone than this series has been putting forth so far, and it’s disconcerting to see more muted-looking pages in amongst the rest.
As usual there’s a touch of gore that Szymanowicz pulls off in a really explosive and splattery manner, lending the action a feeling of urgency and immediacy if not exactly realism. The facial expressions and poses, meanwhile, are all spot-on, the only deficiency being that the many female characters are hard to tell apart. There’s also another one of Szymanowicz’s magnificent double-page spreads, which have constituted some of the best visual moments in this series; and this one, while not the best example, does get across a tangible sense of scale. All told there are a lot of good elements here, and it’s hard to see why the creators didn’t heighten the effect by streamlining them into a consistent look.
Overall “Hell Yeah” is a bit of a mixed bag, visually and thematically interesting but never quite coherent. If you like the idea of clashing nineties superhero conventions with modern ones you might enjoy this series, but the lack of a single compelling thread holding them all together has made these first five issues an exercise in frustrating storytelling.
Final Verdict: 6.8 — Browse
