There’s a young woman who is yelling incoherently. She’s wearing a helmet. And carrying a sword. On public transit. Normally this would seem a little strange, but this isn’t just any train. She’s wild-eyed and swinging a sword in a very tight and enclosed space. A tremendous amount of blood will be shed in Kill Train #2. Writer Olivia Cuartero-Briggs continues a dystopian story with artist Martina Niosi and colorist Simone D’Angelo. The forward movement of the bleak horror story continues to push forward through a great deal of narrative momentum as the train moves ever closer to its final destination. 

Things are going to settle-down once the sword and the blood ar dealt with, but that doesn’t mean that the people on the  kill train can rest. If they make it to the end of the line, they’re all going to be killed anyway. Since the train isn’t going to make any stops. it can make it to Rockaway in 45 minutes. That’s not a whole lot of time to work out a plan for survival. Of course, there are going to be quite a few distractions for that planning as more threats loom on the horizon.

Cuartero-Briggs maintains the tension with a solidly respectable rhythm to the events in the second issue of the series.The opening scene with the sword-wielding homicidal maniac leads quite naturally into a slower moment with the passengers that wastes little time in launching itself into fresh hell a few pages later.. Given the speed of the train and the shortness of the issue, Cuartero-Briggs could really be trying to throw everything at the characters at once. Rather than doing that, the writer allows the subtler ends of the tension to gradually gather as the story moves forward. 

It’s a story in which perfectly ordinary people have been condemned to death and they now need to mercilessly kill in order to survive. And it’s funny. That’s quite a difficult balance to strike for any art team, but Niosi and D’Angeo somehow manage to do it more or less perfectly. There’s dark comedy in all of the blood and severed limbs and carpentry toold being used as weapons. Thankfully, Niosi and D’Angelo keep a firm hold of the horror driving the story as they amp-up the ridiculousness of it all. 

The balance between horror and comedy are absolutely essential. If Cuartero-Briggs and company were to lean just a bit more toward the comedic end of things, they would totally lose the thread of what makes Kill Train such a fascinating exercise in weird horror. It’s quite an accomplishment as it is. Cuartero-Briggs continues to define the specifics of the series quite well as the full ensemble of hopeful survivors are carefully detailed and the specifics of the danger they face continues to define itself panel by panel...car by car on its way to the final panel at the inevitable end of it all.

Grade: A