Damn Them All Vol. 1 TP
Writing: Simon Spurrier
Illustrated: Charlie Adlard
Color: Sofie Dodgson
Lettering: Jim Campbell
Publisher: BOOM! Studios
In M. John Harrison’s novel The Course of the Heart, a mysterious ritual plagues the cast of characters from when they were all in college together. The narrator, who doesn’t remember all of it, spends the book trying to help one of their friends recover from an illness (which doctors say may be epilepsy) that’s been haunting her since the ritual. But as he dives deeper into her current, adult self, and the selves of the other ritual participants, he starts to find that there may be something really weird happening after all and—to his great fear—he begins to see what they see. Then the novel goes many, many places from there. It’s one of my favorite books and from page one of Damn Them All’s first volume, I started to get that Course of the Heart feeling about the world its characters are living in.
Alfie, a great occultist and our protagonist’s uncle, has died. It would be wrong to say that his death was exactly mysterious, or even a surprise based on the worlds he made himself known in. But it did shake things up. Ellie ‘El’ Hawthorne, our protagonist, begins her story recounting the time her uncle Alife showed her real magic and taught her that “magic doesn’t work without a sacrifice,” which will set the stakes for the entire volume. Starting the story this way, by zooming into childhood, the first encounter with demons and magic, and then zooming out to Alfie’s death (and funeral), gives me that good Course of the Heart-esque human connection—the characters live in a world where you or I could possibly live (give or take a few extreme examples). Ellie looked up to her uncle, even if she knew he was definitely into some bad stuff, which she may or may not have now inherited. But it doesn’t begin with bombast, it begins with an uncle showing his niece a new world.
Now that Alfie’s gone, Ellie has inherited some of her uncle’s business dealings/obligations and, in a pivot that took me a moment to come around to, is now semi-attached to a mob family thanks to a little bit of wrong-time-wrong-place-wrong-special-skills. Alfie’s wake has moved to a bar, which also happens to have been scheduled for a hit by a rival mob family, only this time—despite being wildly against mob rules—the rival mob is using a demon they are able to summon with a coin! People get wrecked, more than normal. Ellie manages to help the mob boss escape the demon and makes a new friend along the way. But most importantly: this is not supposed to be happening, something is deeply wrong in the makeup of the world.
Simon Spurrier, who co-created this series with illustrator Charlie Adlard, is no stranger to weird comics, or even demon-hunting magic worlds. Having written crime novels, Judge Dredd comics, and a run of John Constantine: Hellblazer, Spurrier has a huge amount of genre and traditional story tools to make this volume really solid structurally. One of my favorite things about reading it all in one whack of pages is: it reads like a grimoire at times. There are action scenes, there are detective-ish insights, there are demons and magic and legend. But the special sauce is all of the small hints and influences inside of the text. The casual-magic life, the stoner-esque scholars, and the encyclopedic entries about new demons or lore-flavor that interrupt scenes are a big aspect of what makes the world feel whole.
Illustrated by Charlie Adlar and colored by Sofie Dodgson (with color assists by Shayne Hannah Cui), Damn Them All has the perfect style for its story. Character designs feel classic and rooted. Action feels slow and realistic in some ways. But the demons feel like digital disruptions in the environment, which makes them feel out of place in such a good way (because they are out of place). Often seen in a bright triple-vision, the demons stand out as not only massive in size, but as something that should be terrifying to someone who has never seen one before.
To return to The Course of the Heart briefly: one of the first encounters the main character has with something that is not real in the way he has normally understood happens after talking with his sick friend in her home. He has come to stay with her as she deteriorates in health, and in some way to see if it is real. But then he sees for a moment what she sees. In the kitchen, after a fit she’s had, looking through the window and into the alleyway, he finally sees an ethereal force. Something writhing, something intertwined with something else, something in the form of light on a dark and damp street, and he asks: “What are they?” She replies: “There’s no limit to suffering.”
In the world of Damn Them All these things, these demons, are suffering. They’re being used to do violence obviously, but they’re also being used as tools to perpetuate power and wealth, which in turn perpetuates the suffering of others. Ellie, trying her best to right the world again, decides the best path forward is one where all of the demons are excorcised (freed) from their new masters. This leads to one of my two big hang ups with this series—it becomes, for a number of pages, the gang fetch-questing demons and exorcising them. This is not inherently a bad way to tell the story, of course. Each demon has a master, each master has a story, each story has depth and can provide new flavor to the world, etc. But when reading it in volume form, it gets a little bit stale because there are too many demons. The story doesn’t go through all of them, only four or five actually, but knowing the full number makes it feel a little bit endless. This is a very minor criticism, but one that I think is important because it is one way to really prolong this series (gotta catch ‘em all) that I hope the story doesn’t pursue in future volumes without really examining the purpose of what makes that element of the world/lore/history of the characters interesting.
The other minor criticism that I have is that the dialogue is too dense. Too many words for simple actions, too many flavor-text elements to some characterizations of speech, and too many layers at times. In the end you learn how to read the text quickly because the character voices are internalized after a few issues, and it ends up not mattering a lot. But it was a bit exhausting to read at times and I did skim some sections in the middle because the illustrations did the work for me to understand what was happening. That being said, the layout and pacing of the lettering (by Jim Campbell) is very solid. The flow from panel to panel is natural and pleasing, and the different levels of speech are concise.
Damn Them All for me is a solid and interesting story that has a dense, literary feel. It pushes against some of the expectations of what you think the story is going to be and provides a deep well of lore and worldbuilding that adds a realism to a story about captured and weaponized demons. Out now from Boom! Studios, Damn Them All Volume #1 is a great place to get started on this ongoing series.
Verdict: Buy
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Damn Them All, Vol. 1, is available to buy now.
I agree with a lot of what you say here. The only thing I’ll add is that I wonder if some of the elements and density of the story had to do with this originally being launched as mini-series. When it took off, it got a full series order. It’ll be interesting to see how the next story arc plays out….
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