Dylan’s in the nuthouse - but how will he continue to kill the guilty for The Demon from there?! And what the what: there’s a masked killer wearing the same outfit, executing criminal scum with the same MO - did Dylan just imagine he was an angel of death? All questions will be answered in this final volume as we find out whether Dylan will… Kill or Be Killed!
I really enjoyed this one! Kill or Be Killed isn’t among the best of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ many collaborations but, after an uneven first half, the series has built up a good head of steam and finishes more-or-less well.
Not that Volume 4 doesn’t have its faults. The question of whether the Demon is real or not has been an intriguing one but the answer is severely anticlimactic here. It’s basically brushed away and forgotten about after the first issue and, considering that it’s been Dylan’s entire motivation this whole time, I thought that was a bit crappy.
Brubaker played fast and loose with the story, ending almost every issue on a pseudo-cliffhanger. On the one hand it made for an interesting read, on the other, the constant bait’n’switching got a bit tiresome. And Brubaker echoing the reader’s thoughts on the twists like the identity of the copycat killer, and in particular the ending, felt like he was trolling the audience which was plain weird!
But the good outweighed the bad. As pointless as I thought shifting the story into a mental hospital was going to be, Dylan targeting one of the orderlies was a compelling subplot. And it worked out too as it allowed Detective Sharpe and the Russians to catch up to Dylan for that big finale which was tense and exciting in a way so few action sequences in comics tend to be because this one had genuine stakes.
Parts of the story’s potential weren’t realised and parts of it were underwhelming and unsatisfying (ie. the ending) but ultimately it was really entertaining and I’ll take that over anything else, not least because there are so few writers out there of Brubaker’s calibre producing good comics. Couple the gripping narrative with gorgeous art from Sean Phillips and Elizabeth Breitweiser and you’ve got a fine comic.
Whatever my problems with the book, Kill or Be Killed, Volume 4 was a lot of fun and that’s plenty good enough for any series to go out on.
