In 1920s America
with soul-trafficking demon cabals standing in for organised crime families, cursed
fixer Eddie is tasked with locating a kidnapped arbitrator tasked with brokering
a shaky truce between his employers and a powerful rival. As unease and
distrust threaten to erupt into an all-out gang war, Eddie mush search into the
shadowy recesses of the criminal underworld to find the answers he seeks, even
if it gets him killed. However many times.
Despite
the demonic twist to the setting, The Damned is first and foremost a gangster
tale. The underworld of macho criminals, glamorous women, cowardly informants
and indulgence of endless vice is presented in all its seedy glory in a perfect
realisation of the Prohibition era; remove the supernatural elements and the
story could easily be a subplot of Boardwalk Empire. As a result, it’s very
much a character-driven story.
Despite
being physically unintimidating, Eddie is a force to be reckoned with even when
facing the most dangerous opponents. The full nature of his curse is never
explicitly spelled out, but it becomes apparent that if someone touches his corpse,
they suffer his death as he is returned to life. And as is often the case with characters
for whom death is a minor inconvenience, Eddie has a habit of regularly getting
himself killed in variously gruesome ways. This also has the upshot of making
him completely unflinching in the face of demonic power, not just from his
curse making him functionally immortal, but also because after having been
subjected to the worst that infernal powers have to offer, they no longer have
anything with which to truly threaten him.
Three
Days Dead is an interesting enough introduction to its world of soul bartering
and infernal machinations, but aside from the demon dealing aspects it’s not
much more than an archetypal gangster noir that offers little more than what any
fan of the genre will be widely familiar with. It’s only in the horror aspects
that the story properly comes alive, such as a cursed man who has been
transformed into a serpentine monstrosity or Eddie’s forays into the real of
the dead, hounded through a mist-shrouded purgatory by a mad creature with
glowing red eyes. The Damned is an entertaining comic, certainly, but also ultimately
indistinct.
THE
DAMNED VOLUME 1: THREE DAYS DEAD / AUTHOR: CULLEN BUNN / ARTIST: BRIAN HURTT,
BILL CRABTREE / PUBLISHER: ONI PRESS / RELEASE DATE: 21ST MARCH 2017
