Collecting Souls With Obey Me #1
by Josh Davison
[*Mild Spoilers Ahead!]
V is a soul hunter in the charge of a demon lord from Hell along with her partner, Monty the hellhound. The two are given a mission to bring in the soul of a damned, but another soul hunter is on this chase too. This target sold his soul to two demons, and V’s master wants it first. After a fight with a gang, V and Monty find their target…already dead.
Obey Me #1 is the first issue of a new series accompanying the release of a video game of the same name from Error 404 Game Studios. As you could glean from that description, it’s about a soul hunter and her hellhound tracking down a soul.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t do a lot to grab the reader. V nor Monty are particularly engaging or interesting characters, and their mission is treated with enough flippancy as to not seem vital for anyone involved. Hell, jokes are made about how unimportant their job is in this case.
It’s an excuse to have two soul hunters fight of course, and that does provide a solid climax to the book. It serves as a good homage to Soul Eater at this point, which seems to have had some influence on Obey Me.
Obviously, art taste is especially subjective, but the artwork of Obey Me doesn’t do much for me. While it could be said that it matches the narrative tone of Obey Me, it doesn’t give a lot in terms of an interesting visual identity to the book. The climactic fight is cool, but even that doesn’t salvage the aesthetic of the book.
Obey Me #1’s story comes off as a good concept for a video game, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll make for a good comic. Unfortunately, this isn’t a very good comic. I didn’t find myself engaging with the characters of V or Monty, and the story wasn’t interesting enough to leave me wanting more. Consequently, I can’t recommend this one.
Obey Me #1 comes to us from writer Mario Mentasti, artist and cover artist Ben Herrera, color artist Emmanuel Ordaz Torres, and letterer Justin Birch.
