When Abraham Morgenstern arrives in Hell, he’s formally greeted by name. He’s told be a horned man that his father is waiting to talk to him. His father’s Satan. And that man wants to play chess with him. Abraham just died and the first thing he’s going to have to do is play chess with his dad. Things could get worse in The Internals #5. The writing team of Noah Gardner and Ryan Parrott play journalists of the damned in another darkly comic issue brought to page and panel by the art team of John J. Pearson and Lola Bonato.

Abraham Morgenstern asks his father why he gave him cancer. His father isn’t much help there. Abraham was an old man. Old men get cancer. Abraham’s dad didn’t have anything to do with it. All he did was fail to intervene when Abraham got cancer. Of course...there’s a lot that’s unspoken. Abraham did a hell of a lot for his father. “Just look at the state of the f***in’ world.” Okay...so Abraham was a really good servant of Satan while he was living. Satan credits Abraham with the Cold War, climate change AND the rise of social media. The problem was...Abraham was getting complacent…

Gardner and Parrott bring the supernatural family horror story into an end that is its own beginning. The inner complexities of the politics going on in Hell have been a great deal of fun to follow. The game of chess with the devil lands with a few clever twists that manage to land some level of poetry in and around the edges of the moment. It’s not exactly genius, but it DOES fuse a contemporary love for dark family drama with the biblical supernatural for a thoroughly entertaining end to a darkly comic drama. 

There continues to be a weirdly compelling kind of stiffness to Pearson and Bonita’s art. One might hope for a more spectral kind of Hell that feels altogether cleaner or more dark. As it is, there are far too many close-ups on the faces of the drama to bring the horrifying reality of Hell to the page all that well. Postures and aggressive action can feel a bit strange in places, but the central horror of the situation feels quite firmly centered in the drama of one of the darkest family dynamics to roll across popular culture in recent years.

The Infernals had a lot of potential. It’s still really, really difficult to tell whether or not the series lived-up to its potential. There’s such a sense of duplicity about the nature of everyone in the entirety of the story that it’s difficult to tell quite precisely who was lying and who wasn’t as the series draws to a close. That’s part of what makes the series fun, but it’s also a part of what makes it difficult to really assess even at the end of the final issue. Time will pass. The trade paperback will come out next month. Maybe there will be some form of insight into what’s transpired before the series gets its inevitable resurrection in a subsequent series at some point in the future....

Grade: A-