Lady Hel #2 // Review
A goddess of death has fallen to Earth. It’s her Earth. So why aren’t people dying? Why isn’t anything dying? She can’t seem to consume any life at all. She finds out a little bit more about her predicament in Lady Hel #2. Writer Erik Burnham continues to chart the journey of a deposed death goddess in an issue that focuses much more on earthbound drama in and around comedy. It’s all conjured for the page by artist Zhengis Tasbolatov and colorist Salvatore Aiala. Having moved away from realms of fantasy, the metropolitan setting gives Burnham’s story a deeper rooting in contemporary fantasy that serves it quite well.
Lady Hel wasn’t exactly in a good place when she fell to Earth. She instantly recognized it as her own, though. There was no question that she was disoriented, but her own disorientation is nothing to those living in a world where death cannot claim any lives. She’s walking along a beach. The sun’s either setting or rising, and she’s trying to figure it all out. Maybe she’ll do so with the help of a gull who really should be dead along with everyone else who is suffering at the moment. Lady Hel learns a little bit of suffering herself when another supernatural figure shows up on the beach: a goddess of chaos.
Burnham explores an Earth without death. It’s been done before, but rarely from the perspective of death herself. (Though that’s been done before too.) It’s the story of a being of great power wandering around her own Earth, incapable of doing anything. It’s sharply strange with nice, little twinges of comedy in and around the edges. Lady Hel is largely powerless, and so she’s relatable even though she carries herself like a supervillain. It’s a uniquely compelling approach to a story.
Tasbolatov’s sense of anatomy feels kind of stiff and awkward in places, but he’s doing a brilliant job of fusing the fantastic with the earthbound in the second issue of the series. The gull that’s intended to be used as comic relief is supposed to look like roadkill...and for the most part, it does. And as grotesque as it looks, Tasbolatov almost manages to make it look cute without compromising a very realistic appearance. That’s quite an accomplishment, all things considered. As Burnham moves further and further away from the trappings of traditional fantasy in the search for Lady Hel’s distinct story, Tasbolatov’s talents could prove to lie beyond traditional realms of fantasy as well.
Lady Hel is a strangely captivating figure. On the surface, there really isn’t much separating her from a million other godlings in fantasy fiction. Contrast her against a half-dead gull with an eyeball hanging out of its socket on an Earth without death, and she suddenly becomes someone a lot more intriguing than she would be in a perfectly normal situation. Context really is everything in idiosyncratic fantasy. Burnham’s walking an interesting path with Lady Hel.
