The pile expands and contracts like a bellows—always adding, always subtracting, but somehow staying the same no matter how many times I chip away at it. Eventually it will diminish. For now, though, it remains ever present as I make my weekly attempts to get my shit together and simply read. But at least I’m not alone in having to get my shit together as we’re looking at Simon Suprrier, Charlie Adlard, Sofie Dodgson, Shayne Hannah Cui, and Jim Campbell’s Damn Them All and the series of fuck-ups contained within.

Summoning demons is difficult. Magic, in general, is difficult, but the demon summoning is tricky as the process, time, and effort needed is delicate. Our minds can’t quite comprehend what we summon when successful, which is why it’s always been advised to not even attempt. But then the seals that governed the underworld were shredded and anyone could summon and bind a demon with almost no effort. This was a very bad move. Ellie Hawthorne knows this is bad and knows that magic of any kind, especially demon summoning, has some kind of catch. The catch, though, is distinctly more human as the uncle that took her in when her parents died has also died at the same time these demons were able to be easily summoned and contained in small coins. And since a bunch of petty crooks and gangsters have coins, as well as the head of a giant pharmaceutical company, there’s a distinct air of chaos on the streets.

Through all of the demons being summoned, the angels being brought down because they’re bored, and the mass of suffering brought on by both, there remains a distinct story on humanity, knowledge, and metaphysical power of stories. For the most part, much of what constitutes the demons—their appearance, powers, domains, legions, etc,—are based on stories from hundreds of years ago in the various demon compendiums. They’re all beholden to the instructions that people wrote down and others took as gospel despite the lack of evidence that these were truth. But the underworld shaped itself around the fiction, taking on these elements as belief proliferated. To work within the stories and their loopholes is to have a full view of all that can be done. But some people’s views are more myopic, with most simply wanting to use the demons as a means of controlling others in some scheme to make a better world. Even with the grandest ambitions, they’re still using demonic tools.

Damn Them All is another mini-series from Spurrier that gets me excited about the medium—no mind that it’s taken me so many more months to get to it after the final issue. But that degree of consistency from him as a writer and from Adlard, Dodgson, Hannah Cui, and Campbell through the whole series just makes it feel all the more special as it sits in your brain for weeks after reading. 

Get excited. Get summoned.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, & 651) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.