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Classic Comic Compendium: THE DEMON – FROM THE DARKNESS is a read that has truly changed over time

It recontextualizes like Etrigan the Demon transmogrifying Jason Blood's body.

09/15/2025 11:00 am

One of the things that I personally get out of writing these retrospectives weekly is revisiting some of my favourite comics. I suppose that’s a given, but I do mean more than just re-reading favourites. Though that is a pleasure in itself. I mean that it also gives me a new perspective on this side of the reading, with sometimes decades more information and understanding, to inform and reassess what I’d read before.

I notice new things I hadn’t before. I can see different connections that I couldn’t before. I can appreciate a broader context that a work is in because I’ve now also read the material surrounding it. And I can apply changes from that first (or second or third) reading on the current one. Like how the situational context of The Sixth Sense changes when it’s your second viewing.

“I mean, I guess we could always just call Etrigan himself and ask for help.”

The 1986 4-issue The Demon series by Matt Wagner, Art Nichols, Adrienne Roy, Anthony Tollin, and John Costanza reintroduced Jason Blood and some of his supporting cast to the DC Universe following his appearance in Swamp Thing and Crisis on Infinite Earths. Picking up, more or less, on threads from Jack Kirby’s The Demon series, although giving them a new spin with the return of Merlin and a newly reinvigorated quest for Blood to separate himself from Etrigan. And it’s one that changes and shifts on re-reading.

This series has a particularly dense narrative. By that I don’t mean that it’s confusing, just that it has a lot going on. The storytelling that Wagner employs is fairly complex in structure and in dialogue. It’s one that you kind of really have to pay attention to even on your first reading. You don’t need to know anything that happened previously going in (though it does help), but the work itself has some complicated layouts, long prose and verse sections, multiple narrators, and a quest plot rife with deliberate obfuscations. It’s the type of story where you reach the conclusion, have the grand reveal, and turn immediately back to page one to re-read with the new context.

Wagner’s art here is also intriguing. It’s still relatively early in his career here and his style is a bit different from what it would develop into. Like that early Mage and Grendel, it’s more rounded. Exaggerated in a different way than his later squared off work with which we’re all likely more familiar. It reminds me more of Sam Kieth (probably the other way around really, since Kieth worked with Wagner early on in his own career) and Osamu Tezuka. With shadows and a smooth line maintained by Art Nichols’ inks.

There are some interesting expressionistic sequences of colour from Adrienne Roy and Anthony Tollin as they seem to trade off issues. While there’s a relatively dark approach to the colour palette, it’s offset by the bright primary colours of Etrigan’s only colour pattern. An inverse of what you’d kind of expect, where the ostensibly evil elements are the brightly coloured portions. And John Costanza earns his title as one of comics’ greatest letterers working with the sheer volume of text and the amount of rhyming prose.

“Course you can ask all the questions you like of demons, but they only give what they like.”

The Demon by Wagner, Nichols, Roy, Tollin, and Costanza changes upon multiple readings. It moves and recontextualizes itself in the same way that Etrigan the Demon inhabits and transmogrifies Jason Blood’s body. It’s an interesting first entry into Wagner’s work with DC and a sign at how ambitious he could be with his storytelling even at a major publisher. It reintroduces and redefines Jack Kirby’s work for people coming in after Crisis and gives us a story that practically screams for re-reads.

It also made me want to go out a read the stories following this set-up. Diving back in to Action Comics Weekly, Cosmic Odyssey, and Alan Grant’s run on the third volume of The Demon. Seeing things once again from a new, older perspective.