Review by Ian Keogh

Devil’s Reign refers to the end of Wilson Fisk’s period as Mayor of New York and the chaos unleashed by his outlawing superheroes. In his twisted logic he’s hired super-villains to root them out, giving them official status as the Thunderbolts. Taskmaster leads a team consisting of Agony, Electro, the Rhino and Whiplash.

There’s not a great deal to Clay McLeod Chapman’s plot. The villains inevitably rapidly revert to their true personalities, and USAgent turns up claiming he’s the man to keep them in order. Despite political views to the right of the most rabid Republican, John Walker has always been among the heroes, but a few minutes chat and the Kingpin hires him to keep the troops in line. Would that convince you? That Walker has an agenda is no surprise, but there’s little else to surprise other than Chapman overwriting the narrative captions. Want to see how it all ends? Ah, ah. You don’t get that satisfaction here. You have to pick up the main series for a resolution.

Manuel Garcia’s art can’t save things either, what with it all being close-up grimacing and big punches. Federico Sabbatini on the back-up strip is a little more interesting overall, although not shy of showing the brutality, if seemingly allergic to a curved line. His people are all angular, constructed from straight lines.

Early in Devil’s Reign Moon-Knight was arrested and jailed alongside many of the criminals he put there. Jed MacKay’s twist is that the guards are running a cage fighting competition pitting one against the other, and Moon-Knight wants in. MacKay doesn’t make much of it, but without his costume the villains have no way of knowing whether the guy in the prison threads is actually Moon Knight or not, but he sure walks it like he talks it. It’s a brutal, nasty story, but a memorable one.

Thank goodness, then, for the back-up strip even it can’t compensate for the earlier mediocrity.