Daniel Bristow-Bailey Sympathy for the Devil (2020)
I'm still sort of waiting for Daniel Bristow-Bailey to return to the written word, given the promise of 2016's The Ruins, but I'm not inclined to complain about his subsequent focus on comic strips, of which this is the latest, because his ability with a crayon is, so it turns out, comparable to his ability with a keyboard. So comparable, in fact, that it seems almost unfair. There must be something he can't do, surely.
Sympathy for the Devil is approximately the book of Genesis retold as Mike Judge's Office Space. If it's not clear what I mean by that, we open with a celestial board meeting wherein Lucifer suggests dinosaurs be repurposed as something he's decided to call birds, while Michael - clearly one of God's golden boys - poo-poos the idea, pointing out that they'll only shit everywhere, which hardly seems like the sort of thing anyone is likely to want in the proposed earthly paradise. You may already know what happens next, but the telling is something new, beautifully paced, and with Bristow-Baileys' illustration looking better than ever - combining the weight and depth of Jean Giraud with the looser, more expressive quality of maybe Edward Ardizzone. Sympathy is genuinely one of the best looking independent comics I think I've seen, possibly ever.
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