Publisher: Image Comics
Writer/Artist: Stjepan Sejic
Release Date: 9th July 2014

When a brand new book opens with your hero bleeding out in an alley, you know this isn’t exactly going to be a jolly affair, but with a title like Death Vigil and a creator best known for his work on the Witchblade/Darkness universe, what else would you expect?

Raised up from imminent death and inducted into the Death Vigil by Bernadette the Reaper, our hero Samuel finds himself in the midst of a battle against the eldritch forces that lurk beyond the veil, just waiting to be summoned to our realm by necromancers. We join the story twelve years after Samuel’s first death in the alley with the Vigil on the back foot and losing members to the necromancers.

It’s hard to judge a story from the first issue of any title, but the setup work is just fine with our main players and a sketch of their personality well established via some first person exposition, snappy dialogue and more than a little dark humour. Oh, and lots of abomination smashing action.

If I’m bring critical at all, the choice to have an attractive female reaper/death figure is hardly ground breaking but such is a minor bugbear and the hints as to Bernadette’s character and the extent of her power mean she could well break out of the ‘obvious cosplay’ bracket she could all too easily occupy.

The artwork is stunning and almost surprisingly not reliant on an overly bleak palette given the source material. Even though the bulk of the action is at night, Samuel’s crimson garb and electric blue, red and even ghostly green tones shoot through the pages meaning it’s far from dull.

Special mention goes to the Lovecraftian horrors that lurk beyond the veil, all eyes, teeth, tentacles and claws like any self respecting abomination against life and sanity should be.

This is a solid start with promise of becoming a lot more once the characters are more embedded and we’ve got a bit more reason to care. I’ll definitely check out issue #2 when it comes and I’d say that this debut is well worth your time and money.

Rating: 4/5.

The writer of this piece was: Chris Napier
You can also find Chris on Twitter.