Kill Six Billion Demons (book one): part 3

The epilogue arc of book one starts off with another quote, but not from Bizarro-Psalms this time. Rather, it's the introduction to a martial arts manual by a swordmistress named Meti. Meti says she first started learning swordplay in her teens, when she was taken on as a student by some bigshot general for some bigshot king. When said general started trying to take advantage of her, she murdered him, ran away, and kept sword-ing on her own for fun and profit.

She claims to be an unimpressive person who is spat upon by merchant, king, and priest, but that she doesn't care, because she can sword really good. She seems to follow a kind of militaristic interpretation of the myth of Yisun and his children, with the cuts of the sword mimicking the division of greater divinities into lesser ones. Also, she tries (pretty effectively) to dissuade the reader from actually reading onward and becoming a warrior. Especially when the autobiographical intro ends and she gives us her first actual advice on how to sword:

6. Stick him with the pointy end.

I really thought that #5 was going in a Mr. Miyagi direction, but I guess not.

Hmm. This Meti person. Unkempt and overlooked. Thinks combat is a way of reaching divinity in some weird way. Sardonic and blunt. Is she the fat lady who Allison bumped into in Jabba's palace? Cioie made it sound like she was a fighty type when she told her to "look after the girls," and everything else checks out. I'll call this a strong possibility for now, though nowhere near certain.

Well, if that IS her, then I'm guessing she's going to teach Allison how to properly use that sword she picked up at some point. Assuming she didn't just lose it when she teleported out of Throne last page. She brought her clothes from Earth going one way, but that sword may have some mystic resonance bullshit going on that prevents it from being taken the other. Eh, whatever, there are other swords.

We'll have to wait a little while to find out though, because we've cut away from Allison and to an overdressed mummy queen with a hat that she could comfortably live in.

It turns out that this is the meeting chamber of the Seven Black Kings. It's in sorry shape, as if it hasn't been used in a while, which makes sense if they've been at each other's throats for centuries. The hat mummy is named as Mottom, which, looking back, was indeed the name of one of the Seven when their palaces were labeled on the map of Throne. Wonder why they'd bother placing her palace on the maps when she takes it with her on her head, though? Wouldn't they have to change the map whenever she goes anywhere? Anyway, I guess this is our first look at the Evil League of Evil, though several of them apparently didn't see fit to arrive in person. Much to the chagrin of Mottom, who called the meeting.

We know that telecommunications are a thing on Throne, with Jabba's fire-phone, so two of them not even bothering to join a conference call really speaks to how little they care about Mottom's alleged emergency.

So, Mottom's a rotting corpse who bears the world upon her hat. The other Black Kings whose names stuck with me due to their biblical or folkloric origins were Mammon, Gog-Magog, and Incubus. Dunno who's who yet, but I'm guessing that the one who sent a concubine as his representative is probably Incubus just from the name. I'm getting a sort of skeksis vibe from these guys so far; the decayed bodies, extravagant finery, vicious pettiness, and bombastic ceremony amid dust and ruin.

Anyway, Mottom called everyone here to talk about some kind of prophecy that she fears is nearing fruition. One that portends doom for the last seven demiurgi.

So, the Conquering King's appointment of Allison was foretold. And she's destined to cast down the Black Kings and end their rotting reign, thereby slaying the "seven-headed beast" as he instructed her.

God, this is like Neil Gaiman by way of Dark Souls.

The Conquering King is now named as Zoss. That explains the "Tower of Zoss" that I saw in the middle of the Red City on that map of Throne. And, now that the camera zoomed out enough for us to see all the other empty chairs around the seven and their emissaries, this is probably the Conclave of the Demiurgi that once sat thousands of wizards. It strikes me as peculiar that the seven haven't gotten rid of all those extra chairs. Maybe they can't, for some reason? Or, perhaps there's a part of them that still misses their former companions? Could be either, could be something else.

At any rate, a lively and vindictive argument breaks out between Mottom (who takes this prophecy seriously) and a statuesque purple guy named Solomon David (who doesn't). Solomon David, eh? I wonder if he's going to be a dark parody of the Isekai hero archetype, what with his normal sounding name, or if he's going to turn out to be the inspiration behind the legendary Hebrew kings. Appropriating an impressive alien god king for their own cultural history is totally something my ancestors would have done. As they argue about whether the prophecy is worth taking seriously, another of the Seven arrives late. This fellow is named Jagganath, as per the Hindu god. However, I think the author may be doing a bit of wordplay here, as "Jagganoth" sounds similar to a certain English word with a certain memetic connotation, and, well:

That's a human-sized body he's holding in his hand there. Once again, I'm wondering if the demiurgi were actually all human (in the usual sense of the word) to begin with.

The others watch as THE JAGGANATH BITCH stomps over and throws the body he brought down in front of them. It's apparently the corpse of a "thorn knight." Have we heard about thorn knights before? It sounds familiar, but there's been so many names dropped throughout the book that I'm not sure. Anyway, he says that a party of these thorn knights were crossing through his territory as they brought the naked guy hovering over the table here, and he wants to know why. Also, he identifies thorn knights as a type of angel. Ah, okay. So they're another angelic order that exists alongside the concordant knights, then. This doesn't seem to have anything to do with the "four orders of knights" that were mentioned as having been founded during the early Demiurgic era, so I kind of wish the author had found a synonym for "knight" for one of these groupings to make things less confusing. But, more importantly, the naked guy floating over the table unconscious is Allison's boyfriend I guess! And the things that killed(?) Zoss and abducted him were thorn knights angels, seemingly working for or at least with the black queen Mottom.

Age must have really taken a toll on Zoss, if he was able to be intercepted and killed by a handful of mook angels. He supposedly wiped out a whole army of them when he was younger, right?

Assuming that was actually him there physically. Maybe he died a long time ago and that was just his ghost or something? Which then got killed again, but showed up once more after that despite being double-dead? Okay, yeah, there's time travel involved here. Hopefully not too much. This story already has way the fuck too much going on without introducing THAT headache into the mix.

Anyway, THE JAGGANATH BITCH demands to know which of these clowns is abducting random humans from one of his worlds. An unnamed black queen (the one with the weird green outfit and the army of mutant babies at her side a few screencaps ago) starts randomly accusing each of her counterparts in turn, seemingly just to piss them off. This continues until she reaches Mottom, who promptly casts disintegrate face on her.

She gets better though. Apparently she can build a new face for herself out of worms or something. Funny coincidence, I actually have a cousin who can do that.

Wormface whines about having to make a new face, and Solomon tells Mottom (I think? He adresses a "Nadia," and it seems like he's talking to Mottom, but he could mean Wormface. So, there's either a Nadia Wormface, or a Hat-Queen Blanket-Mummy Nadia Mottom Bighat First Of Her Name among the seven) to please respect the decorum. THE JAGGANATH BITCH then elaborates that the human wasn't abducted from one of his worlds, but rather that the thorn knights crossed through his territory on their way here, and that the world they took him from was one of Mottom's. I wonder why they did that? You'd think the Seven would have divided Throne up in a way that puts all of their Gates inside of their own territory, right? Maybe Zoss led them on a chase or something and they accidentally crossed the border. Also, I guess this means that "our" world has been under the shadow of a great and terrible hat without us ever knowing it for millennia.

This is where another of the black seven speaks up. A queen who's apparently frozen inside of a block of ice or something and has had her servants do the talking until now, which caused me to mistake her for a wall fixture and assume she was another member of the seven who'd only sent proxies. Her name is Jadis, apparently, which...okay, this is the first time that K6BD has actually made me groan. Jadis? And she's frozen in a block of ice? Really? What, are we supposed to infer that salty old reactionary CS Lewis was a prophet or something, and he only ever wrote his visions down in his Christian YA fantasy books for some reason? Well the black queen who I'm going to mockingly refer to as Voldemort from this point onward was apparently the one who made this prophecy in the first place, and she repeats it now with some help from her spokesman.

The final part of the prophecy is that the one chosen by Zoss to be his successor, the person who they believe to be the college boy they've captured and are holding here, will be known by his name: Kill Six Billion Demons.

...

Oh my god it's like a 12 year old boy trying to name an Exalted character I'm fucking loling right now.

...

Seems like Zoss somehow tricked the minions of the Black Seven into grabbing the wrong person. Or else he actually did mean to stick the Key into the boyfriend's head instead of hers, and he's just making do with what he's got by bestowing that name to her now. Either way, you are all invited to laugh at silly old me for thinking that "kill six billion demons" was an instruction rather than a fucking name. Seriously, can't believe I didn't expect that. It just makes sense.

On that topic though, what even is a "demon" in this setting? I guess it could be a synonym for devils, but we've never actually heard them being called that yet, and there are plenty of other entities in the story that could be argued to qualify for demonhood. Maybe "demon" is a collective term for spirit entities in general, with angels and devils both being types of demon? Could be. That would hearken back to the Greek roots of the word, with benevolent eudemons and malevolent cacodemons being subcategories within the morally neutral grouping of "demon." Or maybe it's just a name that doesn't actually have anything to do with her prophesied role, which would make it even more hilarious. Whatever the case, we now return to Kill Six Billion Demons herself, flickering through a dusty desert full of giant skeletons. Is this where the Key sent her too? It's not a very nice place. Also, something I noticed in this scene; I can't show the whole panel, due to full frontal, but here's the relevant part:

This weird off-color view of Kill Six Billion Demons shows the Key in a little indentation in her forehead. Further down on her body, there are other little circular holes with light coming out that look a lot like the ones on 82 and 23's avatars. Something to do with shakras or something, maybe, albeit not in the usual places. There's one on her upper chest though, which you can see in the picture, that has a weird black vapor cloud around it. It took me a minute, but that's where Cioie stuck her business card down Kill Six Billion Demons' shirt. I guess the black shroud is what diabolical magic looks like in spirit-vision, and confirmation that she cast one of her paper spells on it before giving it to Kill Six Billion Demons.

And then, Kill Six Billion Demons is back in her dorm room. Guess the desert place was just a transitional realm after all.

I appreciate the minor subversion of typical portal fantasy conventions here. She's come back into our own world covered in blood and ichor, bruised and scratched to hell and back, with the Key very visibly implanted in her skull, wearing Throne clothing, and carrying the sword she'd just picked up. This prevents the impression that Allison was plucked from the "real" world and into a "fantastical" realm. Rather, the world Kill Six Billion Demons hails from is still an isolated corner of Empress Mummy Hat-For-Days' interdimensional empire, and always was that. If Empress Hat had found that key at any point in the last few thousand years before Zoss gave it to Kill Six Billion Demons, this world would have been conquered like all the rest. This isn't safety. Throne and the greater cosmology attached to it isn't a dream or a metaphor. We're a hunter gatherer tribe on an island that the British or Spanish haven't quite bothered to put boots on yet, and she just came back with a map of Europe and a musket.

So, she sees her ripped bra still on the floor, and her room otherwise unchanged. She starts to laugh hysterically and madly in a cathartic fit until her flatmate comes in.

So, on one hand, now that we're back in an otherwise normal-looking world the artist's issue with human faces is a lot more noticeable again. I've seen some images from much later in the comic now, so I know that he DOES get better at this eventually, but for now it's pretty distracting. On the other, her reaction upon coming back, and the expression on her grotesquely misdrawn face, are another welcome departure from genre conventions. The heroine has come back from the other world, and she's completely traumatized by it. This isn't the triumphant return at the end of a hero's journey. It has more in common with horror stories than with typical heroic narratives.

Of course, this is only the end of book one, not of the comic as a whole. But still, viewing this book as a self-contained episode, it's a pretty novel spin for the portal genre.

Rather than answer her roommate's questions, Kill Six Billion Demons runs into the bathroom and pukes up another souvenir of her time in Throne.

Right. The devil fetus from the liquor. Well, at least it came out before it got too big.

That can't be an actual devil though, can it? Aren't they only supposed to be physical when they have a mask to assemble an avatar with? Something worth noting is that devils are supposed to speak all languages, but this thing isn't able to communicate with her (while still clearly saying SOMETHING). So, maybe it's not actually a devil, and not actually intelligent, but just babbling random words in Throne-ese? Maybe it's just a pseudo-diabolical "babblefish" tumor or something. Either way, gross.

Kill Six Billion Demons tells the wriggling thing that she'll figure out what to do with it later, and promptly has an hours-long hot shower followed by a long staring-at-the-walls session.

Kill Six Billion Demons. Please try to pay attention.​

When she's done being semi-catatonic with trauma and existential anxiety, Kill Six Billion Demons dresses in clean, normal clothes and comes out again to find several more girls waiting for her. Apparently she lives in a sorority house.

Everyone is asking where the hell she went for three days, if boyfriend Zaid did something to her, and where the hell the sword came from. Also, she has one galaxy-brained Indian housemate who calls cultural appropriation on the "bindi" that Kill Six Billion Demons is wearing and which isn't obviously a giant glowing gemstone embedded into her fucking skull. Also, one of them facetiously asks if she's been in Narnia or something, which kind of really annoys me given that we have a character named after the narnia books in the damned story already. Poor, traumatized Kill Six Billion Demons just sort of collapses into an almost fetal position under this barrage of interrogation. After what she's been through, agoraphobia is likely to become a longterm issue for her. Fortunately, the first sorority-mate to come in, a girl named Marisa, gets everyone else to leave her the fuck alone as she clearly isn't okay after whatever she's been through. Good girl Marisa. Jump ahead a bit to Kill Six Billion Demons having some food and watching Ersatz Tangled with her friends.

Marisa keeps trying to get her to talk. Kill Six Billion Demons won't tell her any details; just that she's not okay, something terrible happened, and she doesn't know who she is or what she should do anymore. Marisa assumes that this is an escalation on Kill Six Billion Demons' preexisting identity issues, and tries to counsel her thusly.

Kill Six Billion Demons' final answer is surprising. And pretty goddamned impressive.

She's been abducted several times over, physically and mentally abused, had her body modified (and impregnated?) against her will. She's learned such things about the universe as might destroy the typical modern westerner's mind. She's seen horrific death and carnage, and nearly had it inflicted on her. But through all the pain, fear, and confusion, the one thing that won't let her rest is that Zaid is still trapped in the place she escaped from.

She doesn't even like Zaid that much. She informs us that she only dated him at all due to social pressure. But she escaped hell and left a person she knows behind, and she cannot live with herself having done that. It may or may not have been because of her that that whole abduction thing happened. She isn't sure. But that barely even matters to her.

That was all just a practice run. We're still at the beginning of the journey: the answering of the call. And by answering this call, in this way, with mere hours of hesitation after what she's just been through, she's convinced me. She is a Hero. It was hard to tell, with how dazed and overwhelmed she was during her first Throne misadventure, but now that she has the understanding and breathing room that she needs in order to act, there's no question. Zoss chose wisely.

She fills a backpack with things she hopes might be useful. She picks up the squirming little devil-thing and forces herself to chew and swallow it, regaining the power of universal speech. She picks up the sword she brought back, and - having done it twice before now - figures out how to activate the Key a third time.

End of book one.


It's a hard comic to analyze in some ways, and a ridiculously easy one in others. Such a combination of elements...

It's completely a product of the last decade's worth of fantasy media, without even trying to hide it. But at the same time, it doesn't feel regurgitated (aside from a few annoying bits that I don't think I need to point out yet another time). Almost everything in the story feels like it's there for a reason, and had at least a reasonable amount of thought put into the hows and whys. And, almost everything works.

I don't know how to feel about the obscurantism going on throughout the first two thirds or so of the book. I think I understand the artistic vision behind it, trying to make us feel the way that the protagonist does. I'm just not at all sure that that level of immersion is a good idea when said protagonist is experiencing total overwhelming incomprehension. Still, by the time Kill Six Billion Demons found her footing at the end, I felt like I was finding mine as well. It's just a frustrating read getting to that point.

The characters are, almost without exception, great. It's too bad that I (again, like the protagonist) spent most of the comic trying to figure out what everything was and thus didn't get to know anyone too deeply. Including Kill Six Billion Demons, which I suppose might only be fitting given that it lead to her realizing she doesn't know herself. I can tell that there IS much more to each of them, though, and going back to my Tolkien comparison I'm continually impressed by how many of them are so mythic and grandiose while still feeling down-to-earth and human. Even the really nonhuman and alien-thinking ones.


I'm probably never going to run out of things to make fun of or cringe at as I continue this comic, but I have a feeling that not much of it is going to seriously reduce my enjoyment. And, I will be continuing this comic. Book 2 is already in queue. Regardless of whether or not someone commissions book 3, this is a strong contender for my next main project after I finish FMA:B.