3 out of 5

I wavered on this: I’m really satisfied with how Behemoth wrapped up, with its final issue being its best – you exit with the impact toward which the series is aiming. But that does underline the flaws of the preceding issues, which is plus / minus of reading arcs: would I have hung in there and completed this, if I was experiencing it month by month? … It’s tough to say. 

Part of the “problem” with Behemoth’s lead-in is that it’s pretty generic. Which may seem odd when you’re pitching a book about mutated folk conscripted to fight for the government, but, y’know, we live in a world where comics have been doing their thing for decades and X-Men are household names, so there ya go. 

But that’s the book’s shtick, to an extent: to present a slightly more harsh spin on the mutant teen formula – the mutations are all of the beastly variety (changing into anthropomorphic bugs, wolves, etc), and there’s no Professor X, rather just a military man giving you code names, barking orders, and giving you a choice between living in an internment camp, or having some freedom by working for ‘Behemoth,’ and applying your beastly powers to various government missions. 

Our lead, Theresa, whose mutations and mental stability grow worse as we go along, chooses the latter, and that leads to a predictable template: bickering team dynamics; showdowns of power between the military and the mutants; Theresa finds romance with a fellow teammate; there’s a sympathetic scientist… 

Chris Kipiniak’s writing, mostly from Theresa’s point of view, solidly bounces around in a journal voice between inner narration and storytelling, but there’s simply not enough room for character development, and so we make leaps that don’t quite feel earned. These voices also aren’t particularly represented in the lettering, which instead employs an unsynchronized tactic, going from font to handwritten – as part of that mental degradation – between issues 2 and 3. It’s a good concept, but not executed with a sense of progress from book to book; like it was conceived after reading the story, but not wholly aligned with it. 

The art, from J.K. Woodward, is a good tonal match, using a dark palette and the painted style giving the creatures gothic weight, but it’s not suited to the scripted action – painted art is often too stiff, but here it’s just not descript / formal enough to get a read on what’s happening – nor is it a great match when we have a lot of ROOooaaarrr word bubbles / effects, as it just doesn’t layer well. 

…But all of this really comes shapes up in the fourth issue – both art and story. Notably, no one’s credited with letters on this issue (previously it’s Jesse Post), so maybe that allowed Woodward to better focus on page flow, as the characters also feel better defined, and the action reads cleanly, and ramps up well. And the story hits as well, in part due to the earlier template: Kipiniak sticks to some guns, keeping things heavy where a more traditional version of this would likely offer us a some tonal pick-me-ups, and the progress from issue 3’s hanwritten dialogue to issue 4’s word bubbles, which only feature snippets of readable words Theresa can actually understand, is the type of step by step progress it would’ve been nice to experience beforehand. 

And then I’m split – I really like where we ended up in the story, but because of how it improves at its conclusion, I wish the story could’ve continued from here, while also drawing a starker contrast with the unevenness of the previous issues.