Kill Six Billion Demons

Spoilers pertaining to the webcomic in question follow here, though this one's certainly no mystery novel.

First off, let us doff our hats to that truly stellar title! I mean, that's the sort of title you normally only find emblazoned in a dripping blood font on death metal album covers. Yet it just rolls off the tongue like bile, an effect the author seems to have quite consciously created, given the one panel in which it visually rolls in incendiary glory from the mouth of an otherworldly terror. And... AND! that's just as you learn this proclamation of doom's no less than somebody's . freaking . Name .

Whew. That's setting a loud decibel level, alright.

I hold world-building to greater relevance than most, and this comes with a staunch appreciation for bombast, for the lavish grandiloquence which built up our ancestors' folklore from the depths of Tartarus to the top of Mount Olympus, from Diyu to Sheol and Niflheim. It's hard to go over the top with material inspired by the rantings of witless, illiterate, flea-bitten bronze-age bards who thought caves and mountaintops were whole separate realms of existence, so a story drawing on classic mythology usually does well to include a primitive's incredulity and sense of wonder at the vastness of the world ("We're going to see the elves, Mr. Frodo!")

Like most modern media products, Kill Six Billion Demons falls into a lot of politically correct posturing, so the revelation that the prophecied hero simply must (naturally!) be replaced by a heroine prompts exhausted eye-rolling rather than raised eyebrows. The frequently trite interpersonal side of the story falls in step, with one of the heroine's two advisors being a trans-sexual angel who at one point rails against her fellow angels' trans-phobia: if god made us sexless, what sense does it make to insist all angels are male?
Actually, by that same logic, what sense does it make for you to want to play dress-up in the first place? If it's no big deal, why are you making such a big deal out of it?
The second heroine's advisor's arguably much worse, being an author avatar, and any of their scenes together comes across more like an embarrassingly overemoting self-insert slashfic of a more dignified plot running in the background. Needless to say this good demon's a quirky, plucky little girl who nonetheless embodies awesomah powah! And she wants to be good but wouldn't you know it the universe is somehow plotting to tempt her to evil, presumably to be redeemed by love's true lesbian kiss or some schlock* at a later date.
Though eschewing heroes in favor of heroines, villains of course remain decidedly male, with the most notable exception launching into a rant against the male gaze as her self-justification.

Despite such all too common tendencies, that background running behind the trite, shallow, snowflake moral posturing more than makes up for it. That villainness eventually gets called out on (part of) her bullshit, if not nearly as strongly as I'd have preferred, and the frequent by-the-numbers railing against male sexuality (every villain owns a brothel in this story) is halfway allowed to meld into a much wider landscape. KSBD sidesteps the pitfall of its contemporaries like Eth's Skin of grinding the story to a complete halt to bring you this public service announcement. Locale after locale of its mythical world is illustrated in ludicrously detailed crowd scenes, and the splash screens expositing each new backdrop are (and no other word would fit) epic. Basing its story largely on the mythical themes of south-western Asia instead of the elves and dragons we've all grown to yawn at, the artist also puts staggering amounts of work into the convoluted, endlessly re-iterative Rococo parade of angels and devils this entails. If nothing else the sheer visual detail, easy to grasp at a glance but always offering more under closer scrutiny, makes KSBD stand out among the usually perfunctory or amateurish comic "art." It rarely forgets its sense of grandeur and fantastic exploration.

It's not enough to render the comic's bouts of sour old political correctness palatable, but it's enough to mask the taste. It makes "what fresh hell is this" sound appealing. And, when not playing in tune to modern moral guardians, the dialogue proves itself very endearing in its flowery bazaar manners and rhetoric. An attention to detail ranging from the cadence of syllables to wondrous vistas to scuffs on clay pots to the expression of wing-eyes goes a long way.


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*Seriously, could you not have waited a little bit longer to trite yourself to death?