Deathblow: Sinners and Saints
by Brandon Choi, Jim Lee (script) and Jim Lee and Tim Sale (art)
Image, 1999
'Deathblow: Sinners and Saints' (256 pp) compiles the first twelve issues of the Image comic 'Deathblow', originally published from April 1993 to January, 1995.
There is another compilation of these same issues, in hardback, titled 'Deathblow: The Deluxe Edition', that was published in 2014.
Michael Cray, aka Deathblow, first appeared in March 1993 as a nine-page story in the single-shot anthology 'Darker Image' from Image comics. Cray showed up again a few months later in the four-issue series 'Team 7', as one of the members of the eponymous special forces unit. In 1993 Image gave him his own series, which lasted for 29 issues, till August 1996.
Deathblow was envisioned as the quintessential early 1990s, Great Comic Book Boom-era superhero: tree-trunk legs, torso, and arms, topped with a tiny head, wearing a do-rag:
The twelve-issue story arc featured in 'Sinners and Saints' is interesting for placing Deathblow, and various supporting characters from the Image lineup, into a Book of Revelation-style Apocalyptic Crisis.
As the story opens, our hero is tormented by guilt over his violent actions as part of a covert U.S. special operations team:
He nonetheless agrees to participate in a commando raid on an Iraqi data storage facility. But even as the corpses pile up during the raid, a sinister development takes place in a monastery in the remote desert: servants of the demon known as the 'Black Angel' have contrived to open the gates of Purgatory, and free him from his entombment.
The Black Angel promptly sets out to fulfill a number of earthly tasks necessary to pave the way for Satan to come into power and invade Heaven.
At first, Deathblow is simply an unwitting pawn in these schemes, but over the course of the story he undergoes some personal revelations, and willingly takes up the battle for the fate of the planet.
Choi and Lee's plot is a decent melding of superhero action and horror / occult themes, although it sometimes goes a bit over-the-top in its melodrama.
The artwork, which primarily was done by Tim Sale (Jim Lee did only the first three chapters) is the main selling point for 'Sinners and Saints'. It clearly was influenced by the visual style of Frank Miller's Sin City, which had debuted in 1991, but Lee and Sale were much better artists than Miller, and, according to Keith Dallas's American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1990s, Image / Malibu had the industry's best color printing facilities.
All the stylings of Sin City are present and accounted for in 'Sinner and Saints': limited color palettes, heavy-duty chiaroscuro effects, rain slashes and gunsmoke trails forming decorative motifs, oversize sound-effect text, dames with immense clouds of colorless hair, black-and-white silhouette panels, etc. It certainly gives the book a 'look' that is markedly different from the visual style used in other Image, Marvel, and DC comics from the early 90s.
Copies of the 1999 paperback edition of 'Sinners and Saints' are available for under $10 at your usual online retailers, and the 2014 'Deathblow: The Deluxe Edition' also is affordably priced. If you're a fan of comic book art, or a fan of Combat Nuns, or someone who likes Omen - style occult thrillers, or are just looking for a story that represents the early 90s comic book aesthetic at its most idiosyncratic, then getting a copy is worth your while.
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