Publisher: Marvel Comics
Writer: Phillip Kennedy Johnson
Guest Artist: Danny Earls
Color Artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: VC’s Cory Petit
Release Date: 27th March 2024

Considering just how utterly enthralling Phillip Kennedy Johnson’s narrative is for this second instalment of his “Frozen Charlotte” storyline, it’s hard to imagine many Hulk-heads arguing with a fan’s Letters Page declaration that the title “is a consistent measuring stick for high quality”. Indeed, this twenty-page periodical’s superbly-penned sub-plot depicting a ghost detective’s life-long noir hunt for a serial killer set in 1850s New Orleans will probably cause many a bibliophile to hope that Marvel actually gives Inspector Francis Bergeron his own mini-series at some point in the future – Whether it be based upon his historic career or as a modern-day spectre obtaining justice for the recently deceased.

Surprisingly, this secondary character’s greatest endearing quality, besides his remorseless determination to hunt down some supernatural serial killer to her underground lair singlehandedly, is the pistol-packing do-gooder’s fallibility in bringing the murderous ghoul to justice. Before his gory death, the man is clearly willing to continue stalking the fiend who has spent the past century slaughtering New Orleans’ hapless workers despite the Authorities wishing to hush the entire matter up, and his subsequent shocking realisation that the mediocre technology of the Nineteenth Century Pinkerton Detective Agency was ultimately no match for a devil who can scythe a person’s soul out without a moment’s thought is truly palpable; “Wh-What? B-Beg your pardon. I most… most certainly am not – – [dead].“

Similarly as well-written is this comic’s central antagonist, who genuinely appears both as eerily creepy and diabolically deadly as any bibliophile could surely want. In fact, the Eisner-nominated author’s suggestion that Frozen Charlotte seemingly believes she’s rescuing the people she has somehow cold-bloodedly imprisoned within China dolls from “the world that would seem them ruined and broken”, is desperately disturbing – and leans heavily into the notion that rather than be a simple, stereotypical villain-of-the-piece, this sickening spirit believes themselves to actually be the tale’s heroine.

Sadly, what doesn’t seem to strike quite as high a note as the script are some of Danny Earls’ layouts, which at times contain such grotesque-looking caricatures of the Big Easy’s residents that they can throw its audience completely out of the book. This heavily-stylised pencilling does admittedly work tremendously well for the scenes concerning the aforementioned evil ethereal entity, and arguably Bergeron too, but the Hulk himself appears far too cartoony to be all that convincing in what is essentially a horror yarn.

The writer of this piece was: Simon Moore
Simon Tweets from @Blaxkleric ‏
You can read more of his reviews at The Brown Bag