A life spent working in hellish areas is about to bring Brandon to the real thing.
Creative Staff:
Story: Phil Hester
Art: Tony Harris, Eric Layton
Colors: Guy Major
Letterer: Dave Sharpe
What They Say:
Sin is a joke to Brandon Hull. Morality a crutch for the weak, laws mere tools to be abused. But when the corruption he scoffed at begins to manifest on his once-perfect body, Hull finds himself cast into a hidden world of unspeakable horror from which there is no escape. How can you be saved when the evil possessing you is your own soul?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
AfterShock Comics has been making some great inroads this past year with the titles they put out and the creative that they’re getting to work with. That’s something that makes it easy to try out every first issue even if it might not be something that I would think is up my alley. Blood Blister is on the horror side, not my favorite area in any medium to be honest, but I’ve really enjoyed some of the crazy things Phil Hester has worked on recently and that made it easy to dig into this. Working with Tony Harris and Eric Layton on the art with some really strong color work out of Guy Major to sell the creepiness of it all, Blood Blister is definitely going to have a lot of appeal to fans of this kind of material and is likely to get me to check it out more as well.
The premise is straightforward enough in this opening salvo as we’re introduced to Brandon Hull, the lawyer type who works to entangle people up in lawsuits that will take decades and are distractions from the real problem players. He’s naturally proud of his accomplishments because he does use the law as the tools they are, knowing there’s no morality to what’s involved. We see it early on with the lawsuit he’s trying to get people in Oklahoma to sign up for so they go after the wrong party and will never see anything from it, though he’ll litigate the hell out of it and try to win just on the off chance of what it’ll produce. It’s a disturbing sequence just to show how bad off people can be with their situations and it makes you appreciate your own life more. Of course, there’s a twist amid it as the comatose young woman suddenly starts talking for the first time in her twenty-six years of being alive and begins quoting scripture at Brandon and labeling him as the devil’s own.
Suffice to say, you know where it’s going to go. But it’s the going there at the start here that’s intriguing. We get his time with the corporate side that shows the true role he’s playing in all of this and we get time in dealing with his assistant with how dismissive he can be. The cutting moments come in dealing with his ex-wife over his son which is amplified by his trusting his assistant to something that goes wrong and just makes it all worse. Brandon is all about the work and is barely paying lip service to the family he does have. So when he goes to spend some time with his son, who is at a haunted house that the Jaycees are running, it’s where the book begins to really open up its creepy factor. It’s here that he begins to move through the gateway to hell itself and that he’s being drawn into it for reasons unknown as of yet. And it’s here that Hester, Harris, and Layton really go all out in making it creepy and disturbing with the pair that are trapped in the darkness with him and how they’re about to be dealt with by the presumed darkness of hell…
In Summary:
Blood Blister is certainly intriguing as there’s a lot playing around the fringes early on, notably with the title element that Brandon gets infected with that nudges everything forward. It’s a creepy series that definitely plays with familiar ideas but is well executed both in script and artwork. It’s playing to the non-standard designs of sorts in a great way that allows Harris and Layton to up the ante with facial expressions, such as over “traditional” superhero books and the like, and Major’s color work elevates it to a whole other level, especially in the darkness sequences with the way the panels are laid out. With Hester having done some intriguing work before I’m definitely curious to see where this all goes and it’s one that fans of this particular genre should give a spin as it has a whole lot of potential.
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: February 1st, 2017
MSRP: $3.99
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