Review by Sabrina TVBand

The titular Gehenna has garnered a large bounty after an incident involving her security guard husband, the mob, and the death of her family. Constantly on the run from gangsters, she decides to kidnap the son of a mob boss so she can end her predicament once and for all.

It’s a simple premise for a simple comic, designed to move through action set-pieces more than anything else. Patrick Kindlon’s writing is thin as there’s nothing particularly smart or crafty about his storytelling, and the premise, in itself generic, is doing a lot of legwork.

The writing is not buoyed by Maurizio Rosenzweig’s artwork. Rosenzweig’s most obvious aesthetic influence is Frank Miller’s 1980s and 1990s work, but he doesn’t reach the same heights. In Ronin Frank Miller managed to turn hatching into an artform. Rosenzweig uses hatching everywhere, on everything, to the point that it becomes messy noodling. It’s clear that Rosenzeweig knows how to use perspective, but he very rarely does. His work feels loose and sketchy in a way that prevents it from feeling grounded and weighty. The real tragedy is that if Rosenzweig was working with a good inker, the visuals would probably work as intended as underneath the unnecessary flourishes those visuals are solid.

Something else that hurts is the presence of some fandom-y touches that harsh the grindhouse vibes Gehenna is clearly going for. The cover of a prior comic written by Kindlon keeps showing up in a way that’s cute once, but obnoxious thereafter. A woman wears a denim jacket with Gene Simmons’s face on its back; a fun wrinkle, but then an unrelated random guy wearing a KISS shirt pushes things over the top. A couple of random background characters inexplicably cosplay as superheroes, and at one point a superhero character enters the narrative for a fight scene.

All these little touches work against what Kindlon and Rosenzweig were trying to do, or at least what they should’ve been trying to do. And while future installments of Gehenna are planned, this volume doesn’t have a satisfying conclusion in itself. It’s possible that future volumes of Gehenna will make this one work better in hindsight, but future plot developments can only help this volume so much. Gehenna: Naked Aggression is not a promising beginning.