In Volume 1 of a new series, Kill or Be Killed, one of my favorite creative teams in comics tells the tale of a young grad student who is faced with what most of us would consider an impossible decision. Dylan is a pretty average grad student, overworked and stressed out with little to no social life. After a botched suicide attempt, a demon presents Dylan with a conundrum: kill someone else once a month or be killed yourself. With this threat looming over his head, Dylan decides that if he’s going to kill someone, why shouldn’t it be people who have gotten away with terrible things? And so begins Dylan’s hunt for vigilante justice.



I’ve read a few series by the great combination of Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips and Elizabeth Breitwiser (Criminal, Fade Out and Fatale) and I’ve always been immediately enthralled and blown away. This is the first time that I’ve come away completely underwhelmed. Unlike with previous Brubaker stories, Dylan is a character that it’s extremely difficult to feel sympathetic for. I mean, Batman has long been my favorite superhero so I don’t have a problem with vigilante justice. For me though, Dylan just comes off as whiny and self-important. At no point did I particularly care about Dylan or really any of the other characters in the story. Normally Brubaker can take a seriously flawed individual and make them sympathetic or appealing in some way. Not with Dylan. Mostly I just wanted Dylan to shut up and stop moralizing. At every point he attempts to justify what he’s doing but none of it seems very real. The first target is incredibly easy and while it gets more difficult, it was incredibly difficult to believe. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to believe that the demon is making things run smoothly for Dylan or if it’s just going to get all screwed up in the next volume. Either way, I’m struggling to care.



That's nice Dylan, you want to spend the entire comic explaining how awesome you are for killing people? Oh, you do. That's great. The walls of text definitely won't get annoying.

And as a side note, the part that I struggled with the most in this is the way that Dylan handles guns and shooting in general. I have a difficult time believing that Brubaker knows anything about guns. Somehow he gets his hands on a gun owned by his father that’s been sitting in an attic for years, uses it on multiple occasions and yet it never requires any maintenance. And somehow a dude who had never shot a gun before is just an immediate expert. Dylan talks a lot about the bullshit you see in movies about vigilantes and shooting but there’s a lot in this first volume that smells pretty terrible to me.

I wouldn’t say that Kill or Be Killed is terrible. With this team, that’d be difficult. But it is in no way up to par with their previous work and I really struggled to care enough to finish it. I’ll be continuing in case it gets better but this one is definitely just “meh” for me.

Full series review here

I really felt bad for Dylan. He got a second chance at life, but had to deal with the consequences of that. I'm looking forward to reading Volume 3 which is coming out next week. It's a good series. Ed Brubaker once again did an awesome job with this story as he did with The Winter Soldier.