4 out of 5

‘Hell Yeah’ is all sortsa misleading, and I’m sad that I got misled and now have to catch up, because it – and Joe Keatinge – are pretty d’awesome.

See, I passed up because the covers are all widescreen big characters with blood and bats and the title is ‘Hell Yeah’ and Millar endorsed it and the interior has a lot of violence.  It just seemed like another big idea book with no content.

It IS a big idea book, but it’s – surprise – written well, and those panels can afford to be big and bold ’cause that actually have well thought out content and not just images pre-made for posters.  The only real disappointment – that later volumes will hopefully dispell – is that book 1 is all prelude.  Benjamin Day is the son of the man who first met superheroes, who would soon begin a plan to enrich the world by, somehow, granting us all powers.  At this point in our tale, a couple generations past this evolution, going against the grain for realism meets superhero books, things are actually turning out well, and our heroes intentions (shown bit by bit through flashback) aren’t tainted with the ‘but we’re secretly evil’ comments you normally see.  It could still go that way, of course, but for now, all is hunky dory.  What’s fascinating is how much of this Keatinge leaves out.  There’s no excessive explanation or attempts to justify, and he mostly manages to smoothly work the history into dialogue without it getting clunky or pandering.  I assume this will be fleshed out down the road, the how and the why, but by taking the focus off of that and placing it elsewhere, we’re not bothered by feeling like the whole book is just structured around delaying some big reveal.  That focus is on Ben Day.  Because apparently there’s tons of universes – which we know, having super powers and all – and the Bens in each of those universes are being killed off.  …Though don’t go in expecting a resolution to this.  The point of Book 1 seems to be to get Ben to a point where he’s ready to be a government sponsored (or some shadowy government like operation) superhero, hunting down mistakes in the universe.  Will Book 2 move past all the background plotting of Book 1 and just take this Ben Vs. direction?  Will it slowly fill us in while introducing a new distracting crisis?  Who knows?  For once, I don’t directly care.  Because it’s such an easy, fun read that as long as Keatinge keeps the issue by issue quality this satisfying, he can drag it out forever.

Hell Yeah is a lot of fun.  There’s an insane amount of story to tell and only in time can we see what Keatinge’s general gist is for the flow of things, how large or how focused.  It’s not going to rattle your brain like Watchmen, and it doesn’t go for the overkill gut like Kick-Ass (though there’s plenty of blood), and there’s the potential that the book will never really get started, since issues one through five seem to almost be an introduction.  But it’s a lotta comic love filtered through good looking pages and flowing dialogue… and on occasion I think we all want something that can just be picked up and read, and not drag on through endless crises and crossovers.