Written by: Caitlin Yarsky
Art by: Caitlin Yarsky
Colours by: Caitlin Yarsky
Letters by: Clayton Cowles
Cover: Caitlin Yarsky
Published by: Dark Horse Comics
Summary
Issue #2
Jerome moves on to his next assignment, the Ito Sisters. They invite Jerome into their Funeral Home and Crematorium. The sisters are keen on the fact that he’s the shepherd, drop their human disguises and reveal their true ghostly forms. They plead that they are “not hurting anyone” by only eating people who have already perished and are, in fact, performing a service to the community. Jerome quickly destroys them. He brings their bodies back to Quade, who feeds them to the Hellmouth. The Hellmouth is exactly what it sounds like – a giant infernal mouth that gobbles demons and sends them back to hell.
Jerome is then faced with having to send his best friend Felix back to hell, who happens to also be the father of his daughter’s best friend Toby. Toby tragically witnesses the murder of his father and learns about his own powers at the same time.
Issue #3
Toby tells Joanne what he saw and that he has new powers. Toby goes to extreme lengths to try to save his ill mother, publicly exposing his new powers. Joanne confronts her father.
We see Sita, again, who has joined a cult that is determined to help eliminate the demon in her daughter. Joanne is in serious danger as her name shows up on Jerome’s capsule. Issue three ends on a cliffhanger as both of Joanne’s parents are out to get her.
Issue #4
Quade tells Jerome that there is no way to save his daughter and warns that if he refuses his duty to kill her, Jerome is to be transformed into an enormous creature that will destroy the entire city. Jerome is able to have one final conversation with Joanne before he begins to transform.
As Joanne flees from what used to be her father, Sita appears with a van and invites her in, seemingly saving her, Toby, and her grandmother. As it turns out, she’s kidnapping them. She and a couple of her fellow cult members try to exercise the demon out of Joanne, even though they know it could kill her.
Toby and Joanne’s grandmother help her escape, and they head into the city where Jerome is destroying buildings. Joanne wants to lure him away from the city to prevent further destruction by allowing him to kill her. Instead, she uses her newfound powers on her father and becomes cursed as the next shepherd.
Thoughts
Yarsky’s Living Hell is a fully self-contained and self-referencing story with an emotional and satisfying ending. Overall, this story is clean, crisp, and easy to follow. Living Hell is a miniseries of four issues, but clearly, this literary engine has the potential to make an ongoing series with several arcs.
Joanne becoming the next shepherd would doom her to repeat the deadly cycle her father was just trapped in, and she would potentially have to kill her best friend Toby as well, just as Jerome killed Toby’s father. It’s a painful position for any demon to be in.
Yarsky took time to elaborate on the close father-daughter relationship between Jerome and Joanne, which made the ending scene all the more heartbreaking. Jerome was such an endearing character it was hard not to root for him and to hope his family would come back together.
Yarsky’s characters act themselves right off the page. Their emotions are consistently readable, and she doesn’t miss opportunities to coordinate hand gestures and body movements with facial expressions.
As much as this story is about Jerome’s long and interesting life as a captured and escaped god coming to an end, it is also a coming-of-age story for Joanne. During the course of the story, Joanne loses her mother to conspiracy theories and cults, grows apart from (and ultimately loses) her father, and suddenly has telekinetic powers. She must navigate these life-altering challenges – all just before becoming the next shepherd herself.
Our main characters each had difficult and morally ambiguous decisions to make. Jerome can’t stand shepherding his fellow demons back to hell – he only complies with the job to protect Joanne. But in trying to do so, he kills his best friend Felix and murders several others along the way. And Joanne has to face both of her parents trying to kill her. While she has mercy for her mother, she has to make a much more difficult decision with her father. She inherits the same catch-22 that he’s been under: to kill or be killed?
Caitlyn Yarsky manages to tell a mountain-sized story in a bite-sized portion, and Clayton Cowles’ lettering is well suited to the job.
Overall: 10/10
K.L.Murphy has BA in English, writes and reviews comics, and habitually pets cats. Comics are all unique and each one represents an enormous amount of thought and effort. Murphy reviews comics based on a variety of factors, but focuses on the artwork, storytelling, and pacing.
