Van Helsing: Hell to Pay #1 // Review
The monster hunter Liesel has just popped out of a portal from Neverland. So things should start to make sense, right? Well...yes, in fact. There’s the cold, hard truth of a dead human body right there in the forest. (Because of course there is.) Liesel is going to get launched into further danger, but she won’t be alone in Van Helsing: Hell to Pay #1. Writer Pat Shand works from a story that he had developed with Dave Franchini and David Wohl. The story is conjured into the visual by artist Hakan Aydin and colorists Grostieta and Hakan Aydin.
Liesel Van Helsing and Julie Jekyll are running straight toward the danger. They’re in a compromised state. Julie’s too wiped out to bring out the Hyde, and Liesel is out of ammunition at the moment. Somewhere in the midst of running toward the danger, Liesel and Julie run into Hellchild: a half-vampire/half-demigod punk named Angelica. (It’s okay. Liesel helped bring her back from the dead. She’s almost kind of like a mother to her.) Angelica knows that they don’t have much time. The monsters are coming back. Big winged demonoid things that look a bit like gargoyles--and not the cute Disney kind either.
Shand might be trying to cram a BIT too much story into a single issue. Between Liesel and Julie and Hellchild, there’s a lot going on. Add to that the villain and everything going on between her and HER underlings, and well...it really should have been more of a mini-series. It’s solidly entertaining throughout, and Liesel continues to be a very charming hero with a fun sense of humor. The extended ensemble continues to be a lot of fun as well. Action sequences pop up and vanish without proper pacing, and it all feels a bit rushed.
Aydin’s got a solidly fluid sense of action. He’s not always hitting the action at the right moments, though. To get the action to come across with maximum impact, he really needs to get the action to the page at some point closer to the exact moment of impact. It feels like the rhythm is off on the action. That aside, the trio of heroes looks totally badass, and there’s an occasional panel that feels more or less perfectly and beautifully poised on the page with color by Grostieta.
Liesel is going home. And hopefully, she can get things to come together for Julie so that she won’t have to be quite so sick. The ongoing adventures of Liesel Van Helsing have been a lot of fun in the recent past. Her sharp resourcefulness and her quick wit would be interesting to explore in a more frequently-appearing series of comics, but it’s just nice to get a chance to hang out with her on occasion. A more satisfying Grimm universe would also include regular solo appearances of Hellchild and Julie as well. They’re both quite fun.
