Review — ‘Hellhunters’ #1 Is A Good Zero Issue

The cover and title of Hellhunters #1 suggests two things: a pulpy WWII-set adventure starring some time-appropriate Marvel heroes with a supernatural, possibly horror, vibe. Ultimately, what the issue provides is much more the latter than the former, but it does so with enough style and panache to make the absence of the more traditional comic book elements until the very end forgivable.

This debut issue is almost entirely devoted to setup: first, of the villains of the story and then, of one its main characters. After establishing the antagonists, writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson uses them as the vehicle to introduce the protagonist. The baddies are a squad of Nazis, being pursued through the woods outside Kaliningrad by the Red Army. Injured and freezing, they encounter a demonic force and, ultimately (after one genuinely surprising moment I won’t spoil) agree to sell their souls in exchange for survival. This all happens in the issue’s roughly seven-page cold open. Artist Adam Gorham knocks it out of the park here, crafting a spooky setting dripping with foreboding, with iconography lifted from True Detective or The X-Files.

From there, the narrative shifts to the hero, Sal Romero, a paratrooper preparing to jump over Nazi-occupied France. His plane is attacked by what is eventually revealed to be the now-demonic Nazis from the cold open, and the story follows Romero as he crashes to the ground and is killed by them. Johnson immediately endears new readers to Romero — a character from Johnson’s Incredible Hulk run — by giving him a “save the cat” moment by doing all he can to kill the Nazis even as he’s stuck in a tree being attacked by demons. Then we get Romero’s origin, as we see him cut a deal to become Ghost Rider ’44.

With the setup complete, more of the cast enters the story — including Sgt. Fury, the Solider Supreme, and Peggy Carter. With their arrival,  the story shifts out of horror mode and into a more traditional comic book environment. In this regard, Hellhunters #1 reads more like a zero issue than true #1, spending little of its time on its title characters. It could have started with the demon Nazi origin then cut to the assembled Hellhunters. Yet, at the same time, Kennedy and Gorham do such an effective job selling the tone and the setting of the story, that the lack of plot doesn’t matter. The spooky intro and the pulpy war sequence that leads into the Nazi Demons and Ghost Rider origins are entertaining and well-crafted enough as finite little narratives unto themselves that they carry the issue.