Garth Ennis' A Walk Through Hell

 

Two FBI agents go missing in a Warehouse, and the SWAT-team sent in to check out the situation comes out bawling, refusing to go back in.

FBI agents Shaw and Mcgregor go in to find out where their friends have gone.

And then, in their van, in tears and in despair, the SWAT-team commits suicide.

In the warehouse, the two agents are faced with the darkness of their past, and as the world around them steadily becomes more horrible, the horrors without start to merge with the horrors within.

And worse is yet to come.

A Walk Through Hell is one of those comics that is very likely to rub some people the wrong way. If you're familiar with Garth Ennis that shouldn't really come as a surprise,

 as you'll know that this is what he does in most of his work: Violence, deviancy and sex, swearing and extreme gore; the man's actually put out most of those comics that I put on the top shelves, their sweaty red-and-pink pages deemed shocking enough to keep out of reach of the kids.
     Crossed, Preacher, Caliban, his run on Hellblazer; in these there's always some line being crossed, something that'll manage to shock and thrill all but the most hardened of readers. And since I am one of those, so when I need to get my kicks Garth Ennis' tends to be an interesting bet, if not a safe one.
     On top of that, his way of building-up a narrative and his method of structuring stories generally make for very good, and very enveloping reads, easily capable of letting the hours while away, leaving one completely absorbed in the unfolding story.

*BANG*

     A Walk Through Hell is pretty much like that; fascinating and shocking and a pretty good read, annoying in some places but still pretty forgivable there ( more on that below,) and if the comic does one thing wrong and it's a big one! it is that its ending is unmitigatededly bleak, kinda shit and pretty unsatisfying. I wasn't really expecting to be let down by Ennis as his stories tend to end really quite well.
     Despite its content and viciousness, even Crossed had a more hopeful ending, even though that ending was only good in the way of all in medias res endings everywhere, with the happy couple probably dying horribly a few minutes after the last lines or the last panels.

    But not so With a Walk Through Hell; it ends straight up horrible. That isn't anything new par Ennis of course, but at least usually, he brought us micro stories, snapshots of a greater horrible whole, that ended well within the bounds of that greater horrible whole. And that isn't the case here.

     It's a real bummer, as I went into this with high hopes and I really wanted to like this one, but this story isn't really one that stands on its own. It comes across more as reactionary, as an outlet for Ennis to rant against the state of our society, with a higher focus on the derailment of America. But it doesn't offer anything else hopeful on its own, some redeemable way forward, and this isn't too bad all by itself but what is bad is that this isn't a piece of art that satisfies in its own right.

Ennis probably should've sat on A Walk Through Hell's ideas a little longer as anything to do with the supernatural elements and the ideas at the heart of what is actually going on seem to be sound. I would have loved to see more of that. But the whole package is so much a product of its time that it can only be read with knowledge of American society's current ills, and it's worse as those ills have infected Ennis' tendency to craft satisfying endings. But then, this might just be the point. This isn't supposed to be satisfying. It's instead something that's supposed to alarm.
It is a warning: worse is yet to come, for all of us. Be wary, and be afraid, the world is about to shake.

-----

     And I should also mention why that some people are going to end up annoyed even if they aren't left cold by the ending: Though I wasn't really all that bothered there were some elements that were so in-your-face that it jarred me out of my immersion a few times. Ennis does satire pretty well in general, but here his point of attack wasn't much occluded by the choice of fantastical elements this time and instead he chose to put them front-and-center: Twitter, Trump, Racism, SJW zeitgeist, Gender Politics, and more. If that irritates you, then you just can't read this comic.