If The Boys explodes the audiences (but also the bodies), its writer nevertheless continues to offer new comics as evidenced by A Walk Through Hell or how a warehouse becomes an entry into the psyche of America.
At the FBI, we respect the codes (of the thriller)
A Walk Through Hell begins as a banal thriller. The expression is strange but it is fully justified. The screenwriter Garth Ennis first reassures the reader by offering him known codes of the thriller. The first pages show a scene from everyday life. A young couple with a child walks through a mall to do Christmas shopping. Everything changes when they are killed by a crazy shooter who turns out to be an uneventful FBI agent.
We then follow the morning routine of his teammates: Special Agents Shaw and McGregor. This banality is also sartorial: they all wear brown or black suits. This classicism is found in the style of the designer of A Walk Through Hell, Goran Sudzuka. All in roundness, his purity close to the Franco-Belgian serves admirably the story. The cartoonist dreamed for twenty years of working with Ennis and we can see this motivation in the bonuses with sketches and then a page of scenario per episode becoming the final drawing. We can only regret that the scenario is not translated.
The duo of agents works on scripted oppositions. McGregor is a brown man with glasses and Shaw a blonde woman. She is also the main narrator. McGregor is younger and idealistic despite the harsh reality. Shaw is more detached even though her nights are haunted by horrific memories. McGregor is a committed progressive open to strangeness while Shaw is apolitical and rationalized. He laughs at the situation while she sometimes panics. Together, they begin a mundane investigation of a warehouse where elephant ivory and coke have been found. So far, A Walk Through Hell remains in the rails of a thriller but the train of the story is derailed when the agents enter this hangar…
Mix of genres…
The screenwriter Garth Ennis seized us by this simple beginning and we do not let go of the book. A Walk Through Hell switches into the fantastic by the multiplication of supernatural phenomena. Indeed, Shaw and McGregor come to understand how two colleagues disappeared in this warehouse. Moreover, inexplicably, the SWAT response team stayed for five minutes and walked out in horror. The horror in A Walk Through Hell slips into everyday life. The action takes place in the banality of a warehouse. This modern place is structured around efficiency but no one knows what each pallet contains. Everything changes at night because there is no one left. The anguish is stronger by the refined style of the draftsman. The background is in the dark and the surfaces are smooth. One box is enough to intrigue like this double line of police officers who help each other to commit suicide
Ennis knows how to lead several parallel narratives on the same square by playing on the contrast between the images and the very banal dialogues and a recitative telling a massacre. These texts show that the author is an excellent dialoguist. We do not understand everything at the beginning and therefore project. What are child kidnapping specters? What is this place from which we do not leave? Ennis masters the art of storytelling in comics as during a change of page where the banal gives way to the amazement of a violent death that the reader literally did not see coming. The writer is just as good with storytelling by chapter because each new episode reinforces the strangeness.
… for a committed statement
The heroes of A Walk Through Hell are agents from different minorities. Shaw is a woman and McGregor gay in a virilist milieu. The fact that they are not in conflict also sends a message of respect. As soon as a massacre is perpetuated, tweets pop up and an exchange of invective begins on the carrying of weapons and racism. The political context emerges during a dialogue between agents. Investigator McGregor refuses to consider Trump an ordinary president. Much more interestingly, this political crisis also appears in the central parable of A Walk Through Hell.This nighttime warehouse revealing deadly secrets is that of Trump's open door. Through his outrage and vulgarity, the populist releases reactionary impulses: racism, homophobia, misogyny… Officers also find strangers in the hangar.
In A Walk Through Hell as in The Boys, Ennis tackles an authority figure: it is no longer the superheroes but the police. He deconstructs the myth to show the falsity of the representations. Always infallible and cold in the series, the FBI agents are here totally lost. Professional machine in the service of order, they are overwhelmed by the absurdity of the world.
In this first volume, screenwriter Garth Ennis gradually raises the tension by revealing more and more incredible facts about this warehouse. In addition, the personal twists on the duo of investigators are as numerous as they are successful. At the end of the reading, we can undoubtedly say that A Walk Through Hell is the most successful title of the very young publishing house Black River.
Find on this site the chronicles on Magic and An Emerald Study from the same publishing house.
