Review – We Have Demons #1 – Scottober Begins With a Bang

We Have Demons #1 – Scott Snyder, Writer; Greg Capullo, Penciller; Jonathan Glapion, Inker; Dave McCaig, Colorist

Ray – 9/10

Ray: Comics saw a sea-change with the announcement that Best Jackett Press, the personal imprint of Scott Snyder, would be signing on near-exclusively with Comixology and unleashing an array of new titles with top artists. It all starts with what’s been nicknamed “Scottober,” where three books will be launched—and there’s really no more appropriate choice than one drawn by his Batman collaborator Greg Capullo. And so we get We Have Demons, a gory spectacle of a launch book that shows that this new imprint has no intention of holding back.

It doesn’t take long to set the tone, as a college-aged girl named Lam talks to her neighbors, a loving and God-fearing couple—and then reveals that she’s there to murder them with an axe. Aside from some exposition about the mythology of demons in this world, we spend most of this first issue immersed in Lam’s world. We see her lose her arm in a disturbing way as a child (making this another book in comics’ growing impressive roster of disability representation), and witness her eccentric upbringing with her colorful Florida Man Pastor of a dad—who is hiding his own dark secrets.

When she gets too close to those secrets, it leads to an estrangement between them that persists until his death. But her return and an encounter with her stepmother leads to the reveal of her father’s secret room and a good number of other shocks. The idea of, essentially, good and evil being elements and forces of nature that have been corrupting and purifying the Earth since the Big Bang is one of the best twists on the classic heaven and hell mythology I’ve seen in a while. This is essentially a religious thriller that turns religion into science.

Of course, you can’t have a book called “We Have Demons” without Demons, and they do show up in dramatic fashion. And oh, man, that Greg Capullo can draw some horrible creatures. It’s essential to have an artist who can create inventive monsters, and he might be the best out there. This is a heavy first issue, both in size (almost forty pages) and in the sheer number of development, plot twists, and exposition we get. Much like the recent first arc of Nocterra, this is a wildly ambitious comic and likely to be one of the largest-scale books in the line. I, for one, can’t wait to see what comes next both in this book and the line.

GeekDad received this comic for review purposes.