Review: Lucky Devils #2 Makes Good On Introductory Issue

Back when I was in school, I always hated the first few days of a new year. All the introductions, laying out the syllabi, etc. I didn’t want to talk about what we were going to learn, I wanted to learn it. I yearned for the days when the class had settled into its regular rhythms. The first issue of this series felt a little like those “early in a new term” days, laden with exposition to set up the characters, the world, and kick off the story. Thankfully, Lucky Devils #2 reads more like those “after the intro” days, with a sense of what this book is going to look like issue-to-issue settling in. Ironically, it is also relatively heavy in exposition, but writer Charles Soule and artist Ryan Browne manage to deploy it better than in the introductory issue.

Two items of note happen in the new issue. After laying out the premise of the series in the debut, the sophomore installment demonstrates how Collar and Rake’s plan to upend the societal order of Hell is going to play out on a microlevel. Both demons manage to level up the influence of Cam and Starr by subtly breaking the rules established in issue #1. Rake uses a sin borrowed from another demon, and both Collar and Rake extend their influence to affect people around Cam and Starr rather than Cam and Starr themselves. By underscoring how they’re breaking the rules, Soule reinforces his world-building far more effectively than in the premiere. Browne also deploys parallel panel and page constructions to good effect here, putting Cam and Starr in visual proximity to one another while the demons make their respective pitches, even though, in the context of the story, they’re physically far apart. Later, when Collar and Rake are executing their plans, Browne alternates panels between the two settings in a way that they could almost be read as one continuous narrative.

The other significant thing this issue does for the series is further flesh out Hell as a setting. It opens with an extended sequence in which a group of top demon influencers are on a cruise ship-based retreat to celebrate their high earnings, and features a motivational speech from celebrity demon Onion Screws, one of Hell’s top demon influencers. If everything about it — from the setting to mid-level manager introducing Onion Screws to Onion’s speech to the reaction of the crowd to him — seems less like a satire and more a straightforward recreation of the selfsame kind of corporate motivational events which occur in the real world, well, that is the point. Starting there and continuing off-and-on throughout the issue, what Lucky Devils #2 does best in its presentation of the infernal mechanics is to highlight how the scariest thing about this Hell is just how much like our world it is.

All of which begs an implicit question by the end of the issue: with Collar and Rake at least initially successfully in the first step of their plan and high on the benefits afforded them by the subsequent elevation of their demonic ranks, will their tastes of success on the way towards blowing up the system lead them to instead preserve the system, like far too many would-be revolutionaries before them? Is Onion Screws meant to be merely a symbol of the system, or a premonition of things to come for Rake and Collar? Thanks to the work done in Lucky Devils #2, finding out the answer to those questions is much more compelling.