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Wednesday 21 February 2018

Demon, Volume 4 by Jason Shiga Review


It’s Jimmy and Sweetpea vs Hunter for the fate of the world in the last book in Jason Shiga’s Demon series. And it’s an absolute corker to go out on!

I won’t even pretend to remember why Jimmy/Sweetpea are trying to stop Hunter, or vice versa, as the exposition got a bit too convoluted in the last book; but it doesn’t really matter – one side wants to kill the other and that’s good enough! 

The thing about Demon is that the extremely complicated, albeit imaginatively constructed, setups Shiga concocts can come off less like storytelling and more like a bonkers maths problem - such is the effect of reading the first act of Volume 4. And, while I admire the skill behind it, like I might a particularly well-constructed spreadsheet, it isn’t exactly much fun to read! 

Thankfully, once Jimmy and Sweetpea start planning their assault on Osaka Castle to kill Hunter, things get ridiculously fun and stay really great until the end. I’m not even kidding, from the training montage on I was grinning the whole time – even laughing every now and then – because it was so utterly batshit silly! Shiga’s simplistic art style and grunted action movie-esque dialogue (“Fuck yeah!” says Jimmy as he bashes his head in with a baseball bat!) definitely add effectively to the comedy. 

Demon, Volume 4 is a very entertaining finale to an excellent series. I read a lot of comics and I’ve read very few as creative or original as Jason Shiga’s Demon - highly recommended.

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