Lady Hel # // Review
She’s a god of death. But she’s had a rough go of it. She’s been thrown into a large body of water with weights tied to her. She’s a god of death, but she’s got a hell of a will to live. That’s something that she will have to overcome if she will reclaim her throne in Lady Hel #3. Writer Erik Burnham finds a compelling pulse to his story of a deposed goddess with the aid of artist Zhengis Tasbolatov. Color comes to the page courtesy of Salvatore Aiala. Lady Hel gains a tremendous amount of distinctive personality in one of the best issues of the series so far.
Lady Hel is drowning. She’s been thrown into the water. She’s not going to stand for her own death, though. She is, after all, a goddess of death. She’s not going to let it happen. Surviving her own death is going to be a process of finding her way back to the realm of the dead. Getting there will involve finding her way past furies and beyond a massive three-headed hound guarding the underworld. If she can make it through that, she might have to let go of the one thing that means more to her than anything else.
Burnham opens with a remarkably well-defined look at the cosmology that Lady Hel is a part of. Thankfully, it’s not a simple good vs. evil sort of thing. She and her adversary have a complex dynamic that Burnham quickly defines before moving on to Lady Hel’s return home. Lady Hel retains a totally dominant presence straight through. Her complete control of the situation wields an appeal that finds powerful contrast in a vulnerability that she’s forced to embrace as a deposed goddess. Burnham wields a clever balance between action and drama, dominance and vulnerability.
Tasbolatov has found a rhythm to the action that hits the page with impressive impact. The drama is brought to the page with the death goddess in peril as she liberates herself from physical danger. There’s a bold sense of action even in the more emotional end of the drama. Tasbolatov manages to find crisp comic relief in a very realistically shabby-looking dead gull. Given what happens to the gull in the issue, it’s quite an accomplishment that the comedy continues to work straight through until the end of the chapter.
Lady Hel finds a compelling rhythm as the series reaches the end of its plot arc. It’s covered a remarkable amount of ground in the course of only three issues. Burnham has carved out a very unique space for Lady Hel that feels like it could support an ongoing series if it was fortunate enough to find the right audience. Lady Hel’s journey has gained a fun momentum. She’s clearly going through some kind of inner transformation that could become something really interesting if it was allowed to develop over the long term.
