Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
“Belzebubs” by J.P. Ahonen focuses on the daily adventures of a quirky Satanic family deeply immersed in black metal music and eager to descend into hell. Naturally, death holds a prominent place in their lives. The family is led by Sløth, the frontman of the black metal band Belzebubs, and he is married to the fiery and protective Lucy. Together, they have two children – Lilith, their angst-ridden teenage daughter with a hopeless crush on a nerdy classmate, and Leviathan, her younger brother whom she often has to babysit. Essentially, they resemble a modern, musical rendition of the Addams Family, albeit poorer, but with an abundance of black Goth face makeup.
The artwork for “Belzebubs” is black-and-white, well more black thanks to the black-metal theme, and I think it’s really cute, funny and expressive. Although, it was quite confusing to differentiate between some of the characters due to similar character illustrations and face-paint. Sometimes I’d even get confused between the husband and wife!
While “Belzebubs” isn’t uproariously hilarious, it’s undeniably quite silly and amusing at times. Some of the dark humor is quite literal and comedic, such as the scene where Lilith asks her grandmother to move on from her deceased grandfather and stop setting an extra place at the dining table, and the panel flips to show a corpse sitting in one of the chairs. “Till death do us part” is for quitters,” the grandmother says in the latter half of the book when her daughter asks her to stop digging up her husband’s corpse.
“Belzebubs” tends to feel fragmented and random because it’s just a collection of comic strips, and not a coherent graphic novel. However, two major subplots do run through this collected edition: one follows Sløth’s misadventures with his death-metal band, who are struggling to remain afloat, and the other follows Lilith’s creepy-comedic stalking of her ‘cute’ classmate Max. In between, it’s all just daily madness of this family that’s obsessed with satan, hell, death and gory stuff.
Rating: 3 on 5. Belzebubs is also on Kindle Unlimited.
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