I’ve been racking my brain, trying to discover why I love vigilante stories so much.
When it comes to comics and movies, I’m biased heavily in favour of revenge as a subject matter.
B-movies can thrill me if the plot is revenge.
But Kill Or Be Killed (Amazon) by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Elizabeth Breitweiser is far from B-movie material – it’s a five-star comic book by anyone’s standard.
And over the course of reading the first volume, and in the delightfully painful anticipation period of waiting for the second volume to arrive, I came to a conclusion as to why I love vigilante stories.
It’s not (just) because I enjoy seeing people hunted down and mercilessly butchered.
It’s because I love justice.
This must be the heart of the widespread appeal of such a timeless formula.
- We humans hate being wronged.
- We hate seeing other good people being wronged.
- We hate when the bad guys get away with it.
- We really freaking hate it when the justice system fails us.
- And we fantasise about taking justice into our own hands.
Kill Or Be Killed is a direct and purposeful response to the creators feeling as though there was no justice in the world.
Kill Or Be Killed Comic Review
About Kill Or Be Killed:
- Writer: Ed Brubaker
- Artist: Sean Phillips
- Colourist: Elizabeth Breitweiser
- Published: 2016
- Publishing House: Image
- Running length: 20 issues
- Rating: 5/5
- Available to buy: Amazon
I’ve always loved a good vigilante story.
I loved The Revenger’s Tragedy and elected to study revenge in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays specifically during university.
I love everything Tarantino has put out recently.
And I especially love a vigilante story with a twist.
Kill Or Be Killed certainly has a juicy twist.
Brubaker had originally conceived of the main character as a middle-aged man with a family who is run down and weary with life. But he decided it would be a lot more relatable and fresh if he made the main character a teenager.
That’s what he does with Dylan, just your average grad student who tries to kill himself after overhearing a conversation with his best friend/roommate and the girl he loves (and should be with) about what a pathetic pitiable loser he is.
He fails his suicide attempt as though God were looking down on him that night. But it wasn’t God who saved his life. It was a demon.
Dylan gets a second chance, but he needs to pay “rent” to this demon in the form of one bad person’s life per month.
Isn’t that just a beautiful concept?
It’s like a cross between Death Note and The Punisher with a dash of Peter Parker thrown in. That was my take.
Looking up the history of the comic for the purposes of this review, I saw Brubaker himself describes the series as:
Death Wish meets Breaking Bad and 1970s The Amazing Spider-Man.
Nailed it.
You can really feel the state of delight Brubaker, Phillips, and Breitweiser must have been in during the creation of this comic because you, the reader, will be delighted throughout.
Within the first three pages alone, you are already given compelling enough reasons to turn vigilante yourself.
Dylan talks powerfully and persuasively about how shit the world is: big business controlling government, terrorists blowing up airports, cops killing innocent black kids. And we, the readers, just sit back passively and let it happen.
That’s not a incitement to violence. That’s Dylan saying, “You’re not doing anything about the injustice in the world. So let me take care of it.”
By the sounds of that, you’d think Dylan was some big bad tough motherfucker. But he’s not.
The reason we love him so much is because he is the underdog and we relate to him.
Anybody who has been bullied at school, anybody who has pussied out of a fight (we see Dylan unable to stand up to three guys harassing his girlfriend), anybody who has been in the pits of depression can relate to Dylan.
One of the first things that leapt out at me reading Kill Or Be Killed was just how well Brubaker nailed the narrative voice of the main character.
It feels like a friend is sitting across a table from us telling a story.
And he’s being so raw, so honest, baring the depths of his soul, we can’t help but root for him.
I love the complexity of the characters in Kill Or Be Killed.
Even a minor characters have nuance. But I particularly love Dylan. Even when he is fooling around with his best friend’s girlfriend, we still can’t help but like him because we get him.
Watching his evolution from coward to a man of character as he morphs into a killer syncs up gorgeously.
Volume One of Kill Or Be Killed is all about how Dylan gets into this vigilante business.
There are two things I love about the sweep of this little establishing arc:
- The lead-up to Dylan’s first kill
- Seeing what Dylan becomes when he turns killer
The comic opens on Dylan murdering a couple of men who “deserve it”.
But these are not his first kill.
We see a few different kills as Dylan tells his story, but I love the backwards telling of the story, jumping back and forth in time just like we do when we tell stories to our friends, and each of these kills creates tension as we wait to see his first kill.
We get hungrier to see how the first murder went down.
And when we see his first kill, Dylan becomes eminently more relatable in his response.
Think of everything you would do in his situation and that’s what Dylan does.
He wonders whether the demon was real. He wonders whether the guy deserved to die. He goes through all of these internal dilemmas, except for one thing – he feels no remorse.
In fact, he actually looks forward to his next kill.
And so do we.
Once he has killed the first baddie, Dylan transforms. And it’s this aspect that also makes me love vigilante stories so much.
Vigilante stories are all about having a meaningful purpose in life.
Dylan chooses a pedophile for his first kill and that kill leads to the police taking down a sex ring.
Suddenly Dylan is not bummed about the girl he can’t have. He’s got business to take care of.
Another thing I loved about Kill Or Be Killed was just how messy it is. Not in the artistic style, but in the way Dylan kills. It reminds me a bit of The Nice Guys:
This is not like the movies (Dylan himself says as much).
Innocent people get hurt.
He’s going up against those much stronger than him, so obviously he would be sloppy and inexperienced and he definitely doesn’t have the smoothness to say something cool before he blows the bad guy away.
Kill Or Be Killed is a revenge fantasy grounded in reality.
That’s what makes it so enticing.
It’s not just the concept or the masterful way in which Brubaker is able to deliver the story with fervent pacing and well-crafted characters we can’t help but love. It’s Phillips’ artwork and Breitweiser’s colouring that really bring the whole world to life.
Kill Or Be Killed is Brubaker and Phillips’ sixth collaboration and they work like a well-oiled shotgun.
This team knows their particular flavour of crime genre fiction well from their experience working on such modern classics as Criminal, Fatale, and The Fade Out (also with Breitweiser as colourist).
I love the shadowing in Kill Or Be Killed – shadowing on the characters’ faces, in the streets, inside houses. It lends a rich noir vibe perfect for pulp crime fiction.
Sean Phillips working on Kill Or Be Killed.
The story is so captivatingly told, however, that you often forget you’re reading, the dark brilliance of the artwork creating a nightmare atmosphere that you fully believe and take for granted.
But pause at any point and you could frame any of the scenes you linger on. Whether it’s Dylan’s murky reflection in a train window, brushstrokes perfectly capturing the existential sadness that occupies him, or the aftermath of a kill, everything bathed in Fincher-esque green aside from the corpse’s bloodied mouth and the dabs of white snow.
I could talk all day about revenge, vigilante justice, and Kill Or Be Killed, but I’d rather you grab a copy and enjoy the gritty pulp saga for yourself.
You’re in for a treat, a banquet of blood and mayhem, with a message about finding meaning in life running under the violence.