Kill or Be Killed: Volume One

/ Alex Good

Kill or Be Killed: Volume One

Something that I’ve found myself responding to a lot in these Graphicalex notes are comics that will have a great premise that fails in the execution. This happens fairly often and it’s not surprising. Between the idea and the reality falls a shadow.

When things are reversed then it’s all the more worth remarking. This is the case with Kill or Be Killed, another pulp/noir collaboration from the team of writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips (with Elizabeth Breitweister as colorist). I thought the concept here was sub-grade, neither interesting nor credible. But somehow they managed to make a decent comic out of it.

So first here’s the pitch: Dylan is “just an average, depressed grad student” (this from the back cover) who tries to kill himself by jumping from the roof of his apartment building but is saved after getting hung up in some laundry lines on the way down. This leads to him being visited by a shadowy demon who tells him that his “second chance” comes with a price: Dylan will have to kill “bad people, people who deserve death . . . one each month” as “rent for the life you tried to throw away.” If he doesn’t, then he’ll be the one to die.

As an origin story I thought this just seemed lazy. How would Dylan know who was a bad person? How bad would they have to be to deserve death? Where had Dylan entered into any contract with the demon, and why should he even credit the existence of such a being, or his threats? In order to prove his reality the demon breaks Dylan’s arm, but I didn’t find that very convincing. I assumed the demon was some sort of psychological projection, but born of what? The whole idea just seemed a brainless way of explaining the lame premise, which is a young man adopting a double life by going on a vigilante murder spree.

Having said that, the actual story was effective once it got going. Dylan is in a moral no-man’s land, both in selecting the bad people for execution and for getting involved in a relationship with his roommate’s girlfriend. Suspense arises from wondering which of these poor life choices will blow up on him first. Phillips’s art is suitably grotty and Brubaker does his best to make Dylan at least a semi-relatable narrator-protagonist. I didn’t like all the foreshadowing, something that even Dylan admits is too much, but I could live with it. And I felt hooked enough to stick with things for another volume at least. Now that they had the rough part out of the way I felt like there were some interesting directions they might go in. So we’ll see.

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44 thoughts on “Kill or Be Killed: Volume One”

  3. I don’t think this would work on me. In order for me to locate, in person, people who “deserved” to die, I would have to change my entire lifestyle. That wouldn’t be a “second chance,” it’d be an entirely new life. And not a pleasant one. So what would be the point?

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    • That whole business of picking victims doesn’t stand much looking into. Dylan keeps running into likely candidates. But being a vigilante isn’t really a change in his life as it’s something we’re led to believe he was working toward anyway. The demon is a manifestation of his id in that respect.

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      • This graduate student is working toward becoming a vigilante. What the hell university does HE go to? Those thesis projects must be wild.

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      • It’s set in NYC but I don’t think it ever says where he’s going to school. I was curious as to what he was studying but the only hint that’s dropped is that he’s reading Cervantes for one class. And maybe Kafka gets mentioned too, but I might be misremembering there. I wasn’t sure why if he was a grad student his lectures were all taking place in these giant halls filled with students, which seemed unlikely.

        The jump from him being a loserish grad student to be a mask-wearing vigilante wielding a shotgun seemed a leap to me, but maybe he picked up some basic training somewhere.

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