3 out of 5

Well of course Ennis had to dip The Demon into his favorite topic of war, but his tie-in – though tenuous plot-wise – is thematically pretty clever, having Blood / Etrigan rope in the aging owners of The Haunted Tank (and its haunter, Lt. Jeb Stuart) to tussle against an also aging Nazi, who’s doing the whole fourth reich bit, but, y’know, with zombie-driven panzers.

…And with that setup approaching the same kind of ridiculousness as the Hitman penguin-zombie arc, Ennis gets a similar positive energy going.  He loves his over-zealous authority figures, and much chuckles are had with the nazi’s bombastic speeches; the Haunted Tank’s elderly crew similarly fit off of the buddy/ brotherhood dynamic Garth tends to write well, giving him opportunity to do a couple classy lines amidst a lot of amusing ribbing between the old friends.  The Demon’s rhyming gets a lot more lush, and McCrea continues his winning balance between cartoonish absurdity and the grotesque, with fill-in assistance on issue 46 with Denis Rodier.  The title is finding a rhythm.

Alas, it’s incredibly hard for Ennis to really justify much of this.  Etrigan’s position as a hitman is ostensibly the reason for his involvement here – the zombies summoned from ‘nazi hell,’ apparently, but his reasons for involving the tank crew are mystifying (despite a throwaway conversation with Blood on the matter), especially since he proves capable of being dern near invincible once again, and our bad guy’s world domination plans are about as bad guy generic as it comes.  In both cases, walls of boring text try to explain this stuff but don’t succeed.  And Etrigan’s human half is essentially absent from the issues, which doesn’t encourage confidence for Garth’s ability to make this about Jason and Etrigan and not just demon antics.

We’re almost halfway through his run.  A fun story if you don’t think about it at all, but hopefully we get something really solid sooner rather than later.