A Walk Through Hell by Ennis and Sudzuka
A Walk Through Hell 1-5 by Garth Ennis and Goran Sudžuka
Originally published online in January 2019
One thing I appreciate about Garth Ennis is that he tends to swing for the fences, which, of course, usually results exclusively in home runs or strikeouts. I’ve read Preacher all the way through a few times, and that series exemplifies this approach. There are Wows! (“Until the End of the World” or “Saint of Killers”) and Ughs! (“Dixie Fried” or “The Legend of You Know Who”), but rarely a meh. A Walk Through Hell is a mystery, and I mean that as more than genre. After rereading and digesting everything that happens, I trust that Ennis has a vision for where the series is going and a knowledge of how he’ll get there, but patience is required to see if he can pull it off.
Monsters are not my favorite thing. I have never been particularly interested in horror stories, mostly because they had to have monsters. Growing up in the ‘80s, it was normal for kids to love slasher films, while I always thought them silly, their jump scares creating laughter rather than fear. Like many voracious teenaged readers, I dug into Stephen King; most of his books disappointed me when the supernatural aspects arrived. A fellow movie lover once accidentally persuaded me not to bother with The Exorcist by telling me why it scared him so much—it was too believable for him. This is not to say that a movie, or a comic, can’t unsettle me. Joshua Hall Simmons and Al Columbia have both unnerved me greatly, sometimes with a single image, and Karyn Kusama, Lynne Ramsey, and Michael Haneke have all satisfyingly upset me.
A Walk Through Hell is a color comics series by Garth Ennis and Goran Sudžuka that appears to be a horror story. “Appears to be” because it appears to be other things as well. It performs as a detective story, a serial killer story, a dialectic, offers a little shock and gore, and is somewhat of an “odd couple” story. It is also is likely an investigation of faith’s role in navigating the world. Ennis has examined faith in many of his titles, not just in Preacher and Hellblazer, where he made his name, but in other series as well. This is a man who loves God, at least as a character. In fact, unless you only read Marvel Comics, where you may conclude Ennis is an author focused on war stories, it is difficult to avoid religion in his books. Even in his superhero-parody opus The Boys he punishes Starlight, a Christian character, with repeated humiliations.
My lack of interest in monsters meant that I missed some clear signs in the first issue that there were supernatural forces at play. The Hell of the title is not just metaphor, as I first hoped. When I bought the first issue, I scanned it quickly to make sure there were no literal devils. Early in the first issue, our narrator refers to “ghosts” and the story appears to be heading toward the undead having some kind of agency. At the beginning of issue two, our leads, Shaw and McGregor, black out and wake up to find that they have no pulse.
For the mystery, Ennis focuses primarily on hints and delayed gratification. In the first issue, Shaw is having a nightmare with unknown origin. We don’t learn specifically what she may be dreaming about until issue five. The monster in this series isn’t introduced by appearance until the last page of issue three, and by the end of issue five, “the first arc,” it still isn’t entirely known what this monster is about or interested in or capable of. This does mean, however, that Ennis is wisely using our imaginations to fill in the gaps, a technique known to all masters of psychological horror.
Ennis partners with Goran Sudžuka, a Croatian artist who established himself on the U.S. comics scene as a fill-in for Pia Guerra on Y The Last Man. The artwork is steady and sturdy, with few structural mistakes, but also few standout flourishes. Stylistically, Sudžuka reminds me of his Croatian cohort, such as Goran Parlov and Edvin Biuković. All these artists produce workmanlike draftsmanship on efficient layouts. The downside is that many characters look similar and emotional surprises in the script are rarely amplified by visual surprises. I’m not familiar with Sudžuka’s Croatian work, so I wonder how much influence his years spent at DC, where building on José Luis Garcia-López’s house style can produce this sameness.
I don’t want to discount how valuable I find the consistency of structure here, as I frequently fall out of stories when the anatomy, or perspective, or readability is weak. I’ll take the dependability of Garcia-López’s structure over any number of comics artists who push the bounds of in-context believability with their belief that they can avoid realism like Kirby while still maintaining full readability.
There is another likely culprit for this lack of flourish, and that is Ennis’s scripts. Issue one of this series has a script-to-page feature that shows how much information Ennis conveys. It may also be that this is a style of artist that Ennis appreciates. Steve Dillon and Darick Robertson are his lengthiest collaborators, and they share a focus on structure over style.
While discussing the art team, let me take a moment to point out the supportive sturdiness of Ive Svorcina’s colors. He and Sudžuka had worked together once before, on a Wonder Woman story, and they are both Croatian. I don’t know if these are coincidences, or if they lead them to work well together. To my eye, even respected colorists these days are too heavy handed, adding lens flares and bokeh that are completely unnecessary to the storytelling. Coloring is an area where I want temperature and context, and no further distractions, and Svorcina handles this well.
Letterer Rob Steen is similarly without flourish, due in no small part to a hallmark of Ennis’s scripts: there are no sound effects present—ever. This is a highlight of Ennis’s scripting, as the WHAMs and KABOOMs are almost always one of my least favorite things about comics, regardless of context. They haven’t even worked as parody since 1966.
As far as whether the series will end up as a home run or a strikeout, unfortunately it’s too soon to tell. There is just not enough closure to leave anyone satisfied with the story. I’m torn as to whether that’s successful or not. On the one hand, I want to know what happens next. On the other, I’m a little frustrated that no one told me what I was signing up for. I eventually become exhausted by all ongoing series that don’t know when to quit, but that is rarely a mistake that Ennis makes. He knows when a story needs to have an ending—such as Preacher or The Boys, or even his run on Hellblazer. When I pick up a novel, I don’t expect a cliffhanger, and if it does, I better have some semblance of closure in the meantime.
Our slugger, Ennis, has a good team of journeymen behind him, I hope he knows when to swing.