Kill or Be Killed vol. 3

An otherwise great vol. 2 of this series was hamstrung by an ending that made me question how much progress the story had actually made.  Vol. 3 doesn’t make that mistake because by the end of it we’ve finally caught up to and gone past the scene Dylan has been flashing back to since the beginning of the series.  Things start off on an innocuous note as our protagonist has broken up with his old girlfriend, reconnected with Kira, and given up on the whole vigilante business. Naturally, his retirement from that stuff doesn’t last once the Russian mob starts sniffing around Kira in their efforts to find a lead on this masked man who’s been killing their guys.  The ease with which Dylan enacts his plan to get the Russians off of his case is striking in comparison to his reluctant beginnings. It also allows creators Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips to set up some really tense questioning, stalking, and action scenes along the way while believably selling the idea that their protagonist has come around on his “retirement.”

Then we get to the end of the volume and are thrown another curve on the whole business of Dylan’s demon.  I, like a lot of other readers, thought from the start that the demon that’s been plaguing our main character all this time has been a mental hallucination.  Brubaker and Phillips, however, have been committed to playing up the uncertainty that this apparition may be more real than we think. Their efforts to continue this in vol. 3 are their most successful yet.  While I’m still not convinced that the demon is real, the creators have actually made its presence more interesting than the “Dylan’s just crazy” explanation I’d been expecting all along. It all ties in to our protagonist’s memory and how he’s accidentally reminded by his mother that his father used to have a son from a previous marriage.  A son that Dylan briefly grew up with and somehow completely forgot about. It’s when he starts to dig into the mystery of this missing son/stepbrother that the underlying mystery of the demon becomes genuinely compelling. While also leading to an astonishingly creepy final page. Great job on that one Sean — it’s some Grade-A nightmare fuel right there.