Holy Roller #8 // Review
The villain has the hero tied to a chair. The villain is offering the hero an option: either be one of the richest, most powerful people on Earth...or die. Naturally the hero only really has one option if he’s going to remain hero, so it really isn’t much of an option in Holy Roller #8. The writing ream of Rick Remender. Andy Samberg and Joe Trohman continue to play with various superhero tropes in a story brought to page and panel by artist Roland Boschi and colorist Moreno Dinisio. It’s always nice to see the hero get beaten to hell and offered corruption like he is here...because he wouldn’t be a hero if we knew he was going to cave-in to the pressure.
He’s been beaten and shot before...but he’s never been stabbed. THAT’S new. There’s a first time for everything, of course. It doesn’t hurt going in, but it hurts like hell going out. He’s being offered a hell of a lot...and not just an opportunity to get his wounds taken care of. He’s being offered a great deal. There’s no question that he’s not going to work for some sicko who wants to run the country with a superhero there to aid him. What exactly is going to happen to him once he delivers his final refusal, however...that’s another matter altogether.
Remender, Samberg and Trohman aren’t working with terribly fresh tropes in the run of the issue but that doesn’t, mean that they aren’t fun as the roll across the page. The horribly beaten hero continues to meet the insurmountable odds with resilience and defiance as he faces-up to someone who DOES seem to hold all of the cards. The heroism just wouldn’t be anywhere near as intense if his wellbeing wasn’t as tenuous as it is from the beginning to the end of the issue.
Boschi has a style that feels clean, but sloppy and imprecise. It serves the mood of the issue quite well, though. The hero is dealing with a very awful sort of a situation and there are quite a few hallucinations involved, so it all feels more than a little weird and confusing as things progress, but the overall intensity of the action and the danger the hero is in feel quite palpable as Boschi does a respectable job of lowering-in the overall sense of danger.
It’s difficult to do an issue like this in a way that feels terribly original or insightful. That being said, it’s a very familiar sort of a script that feels incredibly comfortable to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the action hero genre. It’s fun stuff even if it’s really obvious where it’s been and where it’s going. The hero who gets the hell beaten out of him and keeps crawling back into the path of danger ontinues to hold a great appeal in a world that s seems to constantly be beating the hell out of everyone. It may not be original, but it IS relatable.
Grade: B-
