Darkness Visible #1

Another comic, this one from independent company IDW Publishing and written by people I've never heard of. I guess it's refreshing to see American comics that aren't from a Marvel or DC sockpuppet. It came out in 2017, so we're getting away from the aughts now too. Also, apparently this comic is getting a TV show.

That demon in the background looks very Hellboy. In we go!

The story begins in a working class pub in London called The Angel, where a demon has been impatiently waiting for his human date.

Well, turns out this isn't exactly a date. She's here representing some sort of organization, albeit a fairly informal one if it doesn't mind her being an hour late (although according to her, that might be a deliberate policy to test the commitment of new recruits like him). It also turns out that she isn't exactly human.

The old country, huh?

He repeats a little Semitic-sounding prayer or mantra that prominantly features the word "Shaitan." She hands him a small package and tells him to tell his own boss where to recover a certain larger package that might not stay there forever. She then leaves the bar amid the stares of the many human patrons who just saw her show off her naked body - including the oversized secondary face - in public.

Cut to a middle school performance of "The Merchant of Venice." The little girl from the front cover is playing Portia. Afterward, her father (the man from the front cover who isn't a demon) congratulates her on her performance, and have a disagreement over whether Shylock is a villain or a victim. Her dad, who's implied to be a cop or cop-adjacent, thinks he's a villain. She disagrees, and says a cheesy line about how he was only a monster because he was treated like one. She's probably quoting her teacher or something.

And if this comic is going where it seems like it's going, well...I have thoughts. :/

As they walk to their car, they spot a homeless demon with mantis claws for hands sitting with a sign that says "no hands, no job." The girl (now named as Mags, probably short for Margaret or something) wants to give him something. Her father assures her that that Shaitan is almost certainly a shapeshifter just like most of them, and is just pretending to not have functional hands for begging purposes.

Well, I mean. If demons actually ARE shapeshifters, then he's kind of right?

She then asks him why people are inviting shaitan into their bodies to become the creatures mingling with humans on the sidewalks as they drive by. So it's that kind of demonic "immigration," then. To what degree are they still the people they were before, if any? Those two at the beginning where talking about "the old country" as if they came from there, so...clearly the shaitan spirits are at least a big PART of the gestalt personality. The longer the symbiosis lasts, the more similar to the shaitan's original form back in hell or whatever the human body becomes, and shapeshifting becomes harder for them. He also adds that if they keep getting uglier and uglier as they became more like their true selves, that should be taken as a warning.

Mags asks if he's telling her that she shouldn't trust ugly people. He tells her that this principle only applies to shaitan.

So, basically, this is Bright. This is Bright: the Comic.

Oh joy.

Cut to somewhere else in the city, where a group of shaitan dressed in stereotypical mobster outfits break into an office building lobby, tell the humans inside that they won't hurt them if they keep their hands up and don't cause trouble, and then shoot them all like dogs as soon as they comply. The leader of the gang who I swear looks like they just copied Marvel's Kingpin and added horns takes the opportunity to torment one of the dying security guards with terrible dialogue before he bleeds out.

Devilpin doesn't seem to mind the prospect of killing more guards than he has to, either. To a frankly reckless extent.

Cut back to the guy and his daughter driving through town. We open on this exchange in particular:

Kentucky Kitchen, eh? Almost like it's a misrepresentation of another controversy involving a similarly named fast food chain.

This comic is having a dialogue between a xenophobic adult and a progressive child, with the former's positions being justified in realtime and the latter taking the transparent strawman SJW position of "if a restaurant chain has ever used a racist ad in its history they should be boycotted forever even after they've apologized and taken it down."

Did they think that having both of these characters be black would make this any less...well, this?

And, of course, neither of the authors are black.

Mags asks her dad why people let shaitan into their bodies. Apparently, doing so grants eternal youth, but over time (according to him at least) the "immigrant" takes it over more and more in both body and mind. Just then, Dad (named as Danny now) gets a call from the police commissioner; they need to call him in right now to help deal with this developing hostage crisis.

Cut back to the crime in progress. The demons have made their way up to the office suite they want to rob, and Devilpin is demanding the combination to a safe from the assistant manager he's managed to catch. When an answer isn't forthcoming, he has his goons put an explosive vest on the human and tells him that it has a built-in security walky talky that'll set it off if any signals come from inside the room. So, if this is the kind of safe that automatically calls security upon a wrong combination being entered, it'll kill him upon that happening.

Um. A fucking exploding collar. With a BUNCH of obvious bombs all over it. Wouldn't that kill everyone else in the room too? Even if demons are explosion-proof, wouldn't it rob them of the rest of their hostages? And possibly injure them enough for the cops to have a better chance of taking them down? This makes zero sense. Why not just keep a security communicator in hand and tell the guy they'll shoot him if it buzzes?

So, the employees spill, the demons rob the safe, and then Devilpin throws a guy out the window when he asks them if they can go now.

Outside, Danny has arrived (Mags is still in the car...) and met up with a colleague of his. Apparently, the two of them aren't city police, but part of an agency called Cyclops that's tasked with assisting the police with shaitan-related situations. It's just the two Cyclops agents plus local police for this hostage situation. And, since the demons have already started throwing civilians out of fortieth story windows, they might as well just move in now since the hostages are being killed anyway.

So, Danny leads the charge. Devilpin sees them coming with his X-ray vision that he apparently has, and send the manager who's still in the explosive vest out first. Seeing the human civilian makes the cops lower their weapons for a second, despite the obvious explosives all over him, and gives Devilpin ample time to detonate it. The manager is blown to literal bits, and the cops (including Danny) are now bleeding out on the ground.

Apparently Devilpin cares about not wasting human lives. Lol, right.

Anyway, Danny isn't quite as dead as the others, and he manages to pick up a gun and shoot the last demon before he can follow the others into the elevator shaft they're climbing down through. Bullets apparently can't kill shaitan (or at least, not this particular shaitan) but Danny's attempt to do so aggros him over into taser range. And apparently electricity does work, if you turn it up high enough to ignite clothing.

I'm guessing those are special Cyclops tasers that carry a lot more juice than it takes to stun or even kill a human, based on both the effectiveness and the smoke. Yay.

So, Danny crawls or is carried outside. It looks like the rest of the demons got away. Mags has been just standing outside the perimeter by herself all this time, and reacts the way you'd expect when she sees the state of him.

A poorly drawn doctor named Glory comes over. She's apparently a coroner, and came here for the bodies, but can see that Danny's situation is a bit more urgent. Erm...did they not bring some actual paramedics to the scene? They brought a coroner, but no regular medical people? What?

Also, she seems to think he has a concussion despite him having been fully conscious and coherent within seconds after the explosion, so on top of everything else she's just a shit doctor.

Anyway, an actual ambulance finally shows up. Thing is, there are two badly injured people: Danny, and the demon mobster he zapped. Apparently that wasn't a fatal voltage for shaitan, just an incapacitating one. Though that shaitan DOES still apparently require medical treatment, so....maybe it's a "less lethal" thing (although less lethal than WHAT I'm not sure, given that bullets do nothing). They're going to bring Danny and the shaitan in the same ambulence, because it's the only one that came to this massive hostage situation. Danny's partner objects, but Glory - who is apparently in charge of all the medical people onsite now despite being a coroner - overrides him.

Are demons unrestrainable or something? IDK, maybe.

Also, Mags rides in the ambulance with her dad and the demon. Because she asked to. Right. On the way to the hospital, Mags tells Danny not to die, he's her only remaining parent. Check out this dialogue though!

I remember when I was in middle school and I used to talk exactly like that. Realism in text.

Suddenly, an ATV back-ends the ambulance. Take a look at the relative sizes of these vehicles, the angles that they're moving at, and the width of the street and sidewalk.

Okay, so. Based on all of these factors, what do you think is the probable outcome of that jeep charging that ambulance?

Whatever you concluded, I'm guessing it probably wasn't this:

Verily, a magical world.

Mags hits her head on the side of the ambulance, and falls bleeding to the floor. Then the ambulance lands in the Thames, and Danny - thrashing against his restraints and screaming for his daughter to get away - slowly drowns.

Then he wakes up while being autopsied by Dr. Glory. I guess the shaitan spirit from the other patient jumped into his body, now. And was able to survive in it, and not its previous host's, despite them being in the exact same situation. Or something. I don't know. Anyway, Danny is a demon now.

And that is, mercifully, the end of the issue.

I hear they're planning to make a show out of this comic. I'm not sure why they think it'll do any better than the painfully similar Bright, or who exactly they think this would appeal to since the only people who would otherwise have a chance of liking it think that having black main characters constitute white genocide.

I'm not sure if the obvious political message was the intended one or not, but like...literally all they had to do, if it wasn't, was to NOT start out by framing the demons as an immigrant community. And that's literally the first thing the comic did, before even introducing us to the protagonists. Having the person defending the demons be a /pol/ user's idea of what a progressive sounds like didn't help either.

And, politics aside, this was just a lame story. The characters are boring. The art is eh. The dialogue is hackneyed and stilted. The worldbuilding isn't interesting. It just generally kinda sucks.