Kill More #1: “Have You Considered Killing LESS?”(Advanced Review)

Kill More by newcomers Scott Bryan Wilson, Max Alan Fuchs, and Valentina Briski is a wicked little comic that sneaks up on you. It doesn’t spoon-feed readers with an overabundance of exposition or dialogue; rather, it requires them to pay attention and truly ingest what they’re reading. And in doing so, the bravura creative team immediately sucks readers in, gripping them with bloody claws as slavering fangs slowly devour them whole.

Yeah, Kill More is that kind of comic.

Despite its dystopian/sci-fi veneer, Kill More is a comic about what happens when society collapses, and when the social contracts between not only institutions and constituents but between fellow human beings erode to the point of no return. There’s a metaphor in there for the erosion of the middle class and gentrification and the ascent of the one percent of the one percent, I’m sure, but Kill More doesn’t have time to beat readers over the head with it. Instead, it immerses them in its hopeless world, a miasma of unchecked violence and poverty as lead characters Aaron Aira and Mwanawa Tarver – one a homicide detective, the other missing persons – struggle to retain any semblance of order in a completely chaotic, broken society. They know how impossible their task is, but they choose to continue forward anyway for reasons that make less and less sense as time plods on.

Kill More‘s central question – How do you maintain order in an orderless world? – becomes far less academic as Aira and Tarver discover their caseloads intersect, which begins them down a rabbit hole to Old Colonia’s darkest secret: that its lawlessness has made it the perfect haven for serial killers to operate unseen. A wide array of murderers with fanciful names such as Lady Facesmasher, the Sufferer, and the Giraffe all make their migration to Old Colonia to operate with free reign. Although not quite obvious at first why each character is included in the story, writer Wilson lets readers put two and two together as the body count rises and the conspiracy is slowly exposed. It’s riveting stuff.

On the art side of things, while Max Alan Fuchs’ and Valentina Briski’s art may not be as polished as some may like, it’s highly effective here. Everything has a slight extra-reality feel to it (not dissimilar to Darick Robertson’s work in Transmetropolitan, though with a completely different vibe that exudes sadness and desperation more than over-the-top). The world of Old Colonia is a far cry from the idyllic future cities of other stories and instead could be mistaken for 1970s New York. It’s a world that’s real, lived-in, and far too familiar.

One of the trade-offs of this stellar world-building, though, is that the lead characters themselves are thus far pretty thinly-sketched. They’re not poorly-written – but readers don’t know much about them yet, other than they’re exhausted but dedicated to holding onto a semblance of law and order in a city that’s past the point of no return. They work well in their designated roles within the story Wilson and company are crafting, and hopefully future issues will give them more space to breathe.

Of final note: for a series called Kill More, there’s remarkably little gore and the violence itself is fleeting. This is a smart move on the creators’ part, as it would have been remarkably low-hanging fruit that would have increased the shock value and as a result decreased the series’ broader themes, messages, and mood.