Sun Nov 13, 2016
“Gone, gone, o form of man! Rise the demon Etrigan!”
Etrigan the demon is a great character, even if Jack Kirby wasn’t really into it. Arthurian knight Jason Blood, cursed to inhabit the same body/space as Etrigan, a demon bound into Merlin’s service, has been developed as an incredibly cornerstone of DC’s supernatural/horror sphere of comics. (This was made most obvious in Alan Moore’s run on Saga of the Swap Thing, where Etrigan’s rhyming was excellently elevated to a characteristic of Hell’s lieutenants.)
The cover to The Demon issue 002 shows Etrigan crouched on a stone archway, which is dripping water, in a town with a medieval aesthetic or a castle square at nighttime (as the moon is visible on the horizon), ready to pounce on a group of torch-wielding citizens and a uniformed inspector. The colors are muted grays save for Etrigan’s bold yellow and red as well as the group’s orange torch light. One of the citizens says, “See–no one is here–Inspector!” to which the inspector replies, “But I heard something!” Above the comic’s logo reads the following: “Part man–part elemental fury! He stalks the dark of night in search of fearful enemies!” Finally, a caption at the bottom of the page reads, “In the den of witches lies the fate of man! Read BATH of FIRE!”
The Demon issue 002
I am an unabashed Kirby fan, although this may be the least revelatory comment by a superhero comic book fan, ever. His dynamic poses, sprawling epic scenes, and incredible character designs are all fantastic in every way. While The Demon as a series doesn’t come close to the full-blown opera of his Fourth World story (and I’m ashamed I don’t have the full New Gods series), it nonetheless blows open some really intriguing doors in regards to telling mythical/chivalric/superhero stories–with characters like Klarion the Witch-boy (first appearing in issue 7) being the perfect demonstration of that potential.
So, this issue begins with a trio of explorers looking for Merlin’s long-lost crypt at a place called Castle Branek, but the trio is immediately set upon by the armored henchment of Morgaine le Fey. Etrigan happens to be nearby and joins the fight, where he promptly wrecks shop until Morgaine herself hexes him so that he cannot intervene with her plans (to steal a spell from Merlin’s tomb so that she can regain vitality).
Morgain transforms Etrigan back into his human form by reciting the proper incantation (“Vanish, vanish Etrigan! Return again in form of man!”), where Jason Blood is left to die … except, of course, that he has an ace up his sleeve: Randu, a friend (who appears to be Sikh, but I’m not sure about this) with ESP. Randu sits at Blood’s house with two other colleagues admiring Blood’s portraits of his “ancestors” (obviously they’re all him in different historical eras).
Meanwhile, Jason comes to, with the aid of the inspector trio from the first few pages, and he realizes Merlin’s tomb is itself the “Eternity Book” that contains his spells and secrets. Merlin’s magic activates some stone gargoyle guardians, but then Merlin himself appears in a kind of astral form to try and help him remember his fight against Morgaine.
As Morgaine prepares a ritual to rejuvenate herself, surrounded by dancing witches, Jason and the inspector storm in on horses to disrupt the proceedings. Morgaine summons a creature called the “Gorla,” a monster with the strength of ten men, who begins whipping Jason’s ass.
Back in his apartment, Randu is compelled to read the inscription on a painting of a knight that looks like Jason, summoning Etrigan to appear and take down the Gorla and Morgaine’s servants. (She, of course, continues her ritual despite Etrigan blasting at her with hellfire-based explosions.) There’s a page of denouement but … holy crap, all of that happened in under twenty-four pages.
This comic is AMAZING! There are so many questions I have, and the series as a whole only answers some of them. Kirby is clearly interested so much more in high-concept experimentation than with a Tolkienesque complete mythos, and–at least as this sort of comic–things work so much better this way. How unique is Etrigan? What happens when he decides to fight back against Merlin? Exactly how much do Etrigan and Jason know about one another’s activities? (Hint: Etrigan knows much more than Jason does about the other.) Why does the token POC in this comic have psychic powers, and what does that tell us about this comic, or about Kirby (similarly: see “Vykin the Black” from The Forever People for another case of racist POC usage/representation).
But then, this comic could be awful and I’d still adore it because of how Kirby set it all up. Luckily, I don’t have to worry about having made such a compromise.