Kill or Be Killed: Volume Two
A mixed bag.
I like how the story is getting thicker, even as I hate all the stuff having to do with Dylan’s improbable love life and I couldn’t understand the way things kept jumping around. Ed Brubaker has to work hard to justify the different points of view while explaining how Dylan, our narrator, knows everything he’s talking about. Dylan’s also still doing that thing where he jumps ahead and then spends the rest of an issue telling us how we got there. And sometimes he’s more than just an issue ahead. At the end of this volume we still aren’t caught up to the gunfight in the brothel where the series began.
Now to be sure a lot of writers do this, and one thing to be said for it is that it shows how much planning went into things. The Chew comics do a lot of this too, for example, and they go even further with the breaking of the fourth wall, albeit with comic intent. But Dylan’s “artistic license” with the storytelling here just confused me. There were more hints dropped in this volume about the demon being Dylan’s imaginary frenemy, his appearance perhaps the result of Dylan going off his meds. But then the demon also seems to know things Dylan can’t, which may be its own version of artistic license.
Otherwise things are escalating nicely, with Dylan’s vigilantism having predictably messy side effects as he keeps skating out onto thinner ice. He’s been lucky so far but the cops and the Russian mafia are closing in, as is the demon. And to be honest, I hope things get worse for him, as I can’t say I like the character at all.
Alex Good 
Well he can always chuck himself off a roof if things get too bad.
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Didn’t work the first time! But he still has a death wish.
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I was a fan of the the first half of Falling Down because, like the original Death Wish, it was about a real person getting fed up. But this….And now there’s drugs involved, the Russian mafia, and a friggin demon?!
Question: Do you think the character is supposed to be a sympathetic one? Or is anarchy the point?
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The Russian mob sort of get roped in by accident. I actually found their presence less of a stretch than the fact that Dylan, who seems like quite a loser, has two fantastic girlfriends.
I think he’s supposed to be sort of sympathetic. A guy with problems who is only killing “bad people.” And he’s sort of a hero in the end. But it’s all kind of hard to buy into.
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Well, you’ve made me ask: Why does a guy with two fantastic girlfriends want to kill himself? : -)
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They seem to be chaos agents and his life has too much drama already.
My theory anyway. Plus he’s just a depressed guy and his meds aren’t working anymore.
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Sounds like the bottom dropped out of the story…
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More like it’s just running in place. Because of the way the story’s told it never feels like it’s going anywhere. It takes the first three volumes to catch the story up to where the first issue begins, which isn’t all that far along really.
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