Paper Cuts: Kill Six Billion Demons

Tom Bloom’s Kill Six Billion Demons is big, ambitious, and omnivorous, a tasting menu informed by hundreds of discrete influences ranging from Hindu mythology to Dragon Ball Z to the illustrations of Wayne Barlowe. Following Allison Ruth, a sorority sister imbued with the power of a dethroned king of the multiverse, Bloom’s comic feints nimbly around every imaginable element of shopworn isekai tedium and dives headlong into a sprawling story of will pitted against destiny. There are deadly contests of martial arts, wars between deranged cults and demonic armies, muddled love affairs, heists carried out against senile demon kings wallowing in mountains of gold. Everything is big, wild, and embellished, every character design a painstaking work of art as enthusiastically realized as the Mos Eisley’s Cantina’s gallery of oddities. The sheer amount of work represented on each page is daunting.

Depicting momentum is one of Bloom’s most notable strengths, an art at which he’s only improved over the course of his comic. From the very first scene, in which a party of Thorn Knights ride down and decapitate a mysterious figure crowned with fire, there is a sense of inexorable forward motion, a feeling that you — the reader — are about to be trampled along with the toppling corpse. His knack for blurring extremities to convey a sense of speed, his clear love of shonen anime present in characters hollering the names of their mystic techniques as they execute them, there’s a liveliness here that helps Bloom’s many, many influences blend seamlessly together into a whole as compelling as it is expansive. There’s something reminiscent of Star Wars in it, a syncretic approach to many different genres, traditions, and points of inspiration the end result of which feels totally unique. 

One of the reasons Kill Six Billion Demons’ extravagant action sequences feel so exciting is that there’s a real sense of context at work in virtually every one of them. Bloom is always dispensing tidbits of history and characterization, as often through passing dialogue and background illustration as through recognizable exposition. He may be following a pretty standard story template, dropping his characters into new settings and then blasting the status quo to pieces while filling in the backstory of his huge, strange multiverse, but the sheer visual and thematic depth of each new palace or empire or wine shop into which we’re thrown elevates things immeasurably. The comic has the gleeful forward momentum and idiosyncratic characters of Samurai Champloo married to the obsessive detail and exquisite backdrops of Bosch’s paintings of Hell. 

Consider the devil bar into which Allison teleports upon her late-series return to Hell after a quick detour back to Earth to reckon with her place in the story unfolding around her. The bizarre drinks, the monolithic architecture in the background, the patrons with their distinctive masks in an array of styles — some familiar to the reader, others indicative of entire worlds we’ve never glimpsed. Some of these designs will recur within Bloom’s greater narrative, others will simply appear and disappear, suggesting corners of the multiverse we’ll never see or understand. There’s something of Robert E. Howard’s fantasies here in that sense of eerie mystery, that mixture of hostility and wonder and confusion around every turn. 

Or think of the angel White Chain’s sojourn to the Void, her gradual acceptance of her humanlike qualities and gender even in the face of an entire plane purpose-built to keep her kind denatured and identical to one another. There’s a playfulness to the material that keeps any of it from feeling like a lecture, but the scene still makes its points cleanly and directly while showing us something strange and wondrous. Bloom is much more inclined to letting the work do its own communication, as in his straightforward inclusion of fat and disabled characters of all types and sizes, an element which on top of being a refreshing change from the hidebound norms of character design in comics serves to heighten the setting’s sense of expansiveness. Nothing is same-y or repetitive here.

Currently in its last arc, Kill Six Billion Demons stands poised to become a timeless piece of action comics, something every bit as visually ambitious as Guy Davis’s The Marquis or Kerascoet’s Satania but in the mold of The Epic of Gilgamesh or Star Wars or Journey to the West. It combines high-flying designs and epic stories of mastery, failure, violence, love, and loss with a writing style at once eminently readable and deeply granular, skirting countless pitfalls of modern epic storytelling on the way. For the creator of something so visually unrestrained, Bloom’s restraint when it comes to dialogue and sketching the connections between characters is truly remarkable. Whatever their experience of his work, no one could regret having read it.