Review: Carver Hale: Twisting the Knife

Been on the look out for this one a while and I lucked out on ebay the other day.
Read it pretty quick as it's a rather short little comic, give or take 50 pages.

Verdict:

Ehhhh, yeah it's alright.

From the mind of Mike Carey, creator of the Angelic/Demonic epic Lucifer, comes a tale of british gangster vengeance set in a world where demons scheme against one another, while riding shotgun in the bodies of humans.

The black and white art, by Mike Perkins and Dylan Teaugue, is not very good but there's little to comment on as nothing's really outright awful nor is there anything particularily awesome, apart from the two colour covers included at the back of the comic which are both in their own way, incredibly bad-ass.

The only instance in the entire book where
Carver's face tattoo doesn't look like a completely stupid idea.

The story itself is a pretty rote vengeance story (but not really).

Carver Hale is the right-hand man of a local big gangster. When 3 seemingly invulnerable goons walk through a hail of bullets and assassinate the big gangster's entire outfit, puttting an extra bullet in Hale's heart for good measure, it's revealed that the big gangster wasn't human at all, but a demonic spirit that was targeted by a rival demon. With the end of that gangster's body the demon spirits himself into the bullet in Carver's heart.
Hale is reanimated by the demon, forced to do its bidding and so begins a bloody tale of vengeance.

Again, it's not really bad. It's just a little unambitious.

There's glimpses of a larger world but its mythology is so sparsely hinted at that it never becomes  anywhere close to being interesting. There are several mentions of a war and some namedropping to various locations, Lucifer and demons. But the demonic spirits themselves look like someone took a swift glance at an hr Geiger picture and then tried to replicate it by memory.

The lady of the Thorns is an interesting character but very underused and mostly just inserted to appeal to the teenage boy audience. I'm not complaining, mind you.

Shades of Clive Barker. Lust and Disgust.

A typical british crime romp mixed with Keanu Reeves' Constantine. Though the guns in that one are definitely a lot cooler.

Not bad, but certainly not great; mediocre then.

Also; name-dropping Belgium. Points added or deducted?