Review by Ian Keogh
Kill or Be Killed begins with the horror of protagonist Dylan going about his murderous business in exceptionally brutal fashion during a scene the series will revisit several times. Masked and hooded, he batters and shoots several people while his narrative captions list a selection of atrocities in explaining why there’s no justice.
Why’s Dylan there? Because his life didn’t end with a suicide attempt, and that came with the cost of appeasing the demon who claimed responsibility for his survival by killing one person who thoroughly deserves it each and every month.
It’s yet another killer premise from Ed Brubaker superlatively drawn by Sean Phillips. Is Dylan hallucinating after his aborted suicide, or is the demon real? We don’t know, but Brubaker and Phillips keep it real by having an ordinary slob suddenly need to equip himself with a gun. Where would you go? And then, could you go through with it? Where’s the line drawn about who’s deserving? The result is the opposite side of the coin from the Punisher’s certainty, a constant squirming ethical stew.
Before Kill or Be Killed the character studies of the trapped and dispossessed produced by Brubaker and Phillips might have featured in an ongoing title, but broke down into individual character arcs. Dylan’s story occupies four volumes of Kill or Be Killed, unless you pick up the Deluxe Edition, of course. It means much of Volume One is set-up, although Dylan’s personality changes. He becomes more confident, and more observant, realising he needs to avoid areas with security cameras and plan for eventualities.
Perhaps to differentiate the series from other Brubaker and Phillips crime projects, there’s the recurring device of telling parts of the story as narrative text running down the side of a page accompanied by an illustration at a ratio of roughly a third to two thirds. It’s uncharacteristically showy for Phillips, who usually supplies superlative pages entirely in the service of a story, at the cost of some people realising just how good he is. Still, they’re very nice to see, every one a book cover, and the meanderings of Dylan’s life allow for one of them being a cheesy old fashioned SF painting.
The primary discovery Dylan makes is just how difficult it is to maintain a secret life in practical terms. There’s the lack of sleep, questions from flatmates and finding the time to see to the daily necessities. Despite the lurid title, Kill or Be Killed is very much a personal story about someone struggling to cope punctuated by brutal interludes, and the cliffhanger ending leading to Volume Two reflects that. You’ll be hooked.
