2 out of 5

After an okey-dokey introductory issue, Ennis succumbs to the same focus mish-mash problems as his initial Hitman arc.  In fact, it’s the same exact problem, but one that might prove to be more challenging for Demon to overcome.

Stemming out if the monster-infused Bloodlines nonsense, Garth blended street hood Tommy Monaghan with demon-hunting for the first few issues of Hitman, and the combination just didn’t work.  The title began to hit a streak when Garth paired humans with humans (and it’s noteworthy that Tommy’s mind-reading powers were often downplayed thereafter as well).

Demon – Etrigan – is obviously inextricably tied to Hell, but he has his human counterpart, Jason Blood, to ground things.  And fans were apparently looking forward to some Earthbound antics post previous writer Alan Grant’s run, and so Garth’s apparent solution to that was to “hire” Etrigan to be Hell’s assassin on Earth for Hell escapees.  Which is an acceptable clever way to package things for story arcs, but our first outing is pretty much a mess.  The cutaways to Blood are stitched in randomly, and often jarringly – there’s no sense these characters are linked – and much like Garth bungled Tommy’s early relationships in his title, he sets about trying to piece together a narrative with Blood’s girlfriend, Glenda, that contains approximately 0% believable / understandable motivation or dialogue.  While that plotline flips, Etrigan has some fun tracking his quarry – which McCrea illustrates with delightful zest – but some ultimate plan to resurrect an even bigger demon quickly undercuts the relevance of Etrigan’s original target, Asteroth, making his scenes superfluous.  And when the big bad finally appears, Etrigan dispatches him, essentially with a poem.

Stakes, this comic hath not.

There’s an appreciable energy running throughout that keeps things readable – Garth is clearly having a gas with the dumb rhymes – but the content, plotwise, is largely forgettable.  Hopefully the similarities to Hitman will continue in the sense that the title will soon find its footing.