Review by Frank Plowright

Gregg Hurwitz’s first outing on Foolkiller was explicitly ultra-violent and thoroughly unsavoury. Both qualms might have been acceptable in the service of a good story, but Fool’s Paradise wasn’t a good story.

White Angels is an immediate improvement for Paul Azaceta’s thoughtful art. He doesn’t follow the established pattern of sensationalist in your face violence, although brutality occurs and Azaceta also crosses lines, but for the most part the pages are humane and considered in following former convict Darrell Goode on his first week of release. Unlike anyone in the previous book, he’s someone readers can sympathise with, unless, of course, they instead identify with the hooded men driving around Los Angeles late at night lynching African-Americans. They call themselves the White Angels.

Gratuitous sordidness is still a constituent of Hurwitz’s script, and unfortunately after the first chapter things go rapidly downhill as pretty well everyone involved is either hateful, a violent vigilante or anonymous. There’s no real point of reader identification other than the joy of seeing the thoroughly deserving lined up and mowed down, and you could play a video game and have the greater satisfaction and fun of doing that yourself.

Hurwitz does pull one surprise just before the halfway point, but everything else is delivered in such broad strokes, and there’s so much hate speech featured in passing it wouldn’t be unreasonable to question if Hurwitz is in some way sympathetic. It’s more likely just exaggeratedly poor writing, but there’s a lot of it. Azaceta’s quality art marks this as an improvement, but not by much.