Planet Of Daemons #4 - Amigo Comics

PLANET OF DAEMONS No. 4, August 2017

As showdowns with a daemon of war go, Amos Deathridge’s final battle against the forces of Count Eligos and the horrifying revelation as to the Seventeenth Century magistrate’s origin, arguably provides its audience with precisely the sort of cataclysmic conclusion one would expect to immediately have its readers clamouring for more. In fact, Kevin Gunstone’s narrative for Issue Four of “Planet Of Daemons” provides something akin to the perfect ending for this mini-series, as his penmanship not only addresses the myriad of mysteries surrounding “the real identity of the Succubus Queen, Heinous", as well as the cause of the puritan’s vague visions concerning “the life he left behind”. But also sets the jailer of the Prison-House of Angels up for a scintillating sequel courtesy of the grieving father both glimpsing his dead son’s soul as a trapped entity in the occult realm of evil, and the morally-strict church-goer’s cajoling of the boy’s misguided mother into eternal servitude at his side.

Foremost of these ‘hooks’ is debatably the disclosure that the grizzled amnesiac inadvertently killed his own treacherous spouse whilst riding down a group of hooded cultists who were desecrating young Zachary’s corpse for their own nefarious ends. Enraged at the sheer monstrousness of their actions, and the probable slaying of Ezra as the man desperately tried to rescue the dead lad’s “body from the flames”, it is all too easy to imagine the red mist blinding Amos as to the dangers of his headlong charge into the void in vengeful pursuit of a horned daemoness. Just how the man’s sanity is going to recover from such a torturous vision in the long-term is left teasingly unanswered at the end of this twenty-seven page periodical, especially when an unholy supernatural spirit of Trinity now administers to his needs.

Likewise, thanks in part to some pathos-packed pencilling by Paul Moore, Gunstone also delivers a fitting resolution to the eternal troubles of Deathridge’s former friend Silas, whose death on Earth was both hauntingly harrowing and utterly unjust. Now seemingly destined to walk Gamaliel, a world of the Qliphoth, as a cloven-hooved monstrosity, the man finally succeeds in extracting a revenge of sorts against his persecutors by shooting Heinous through the head and ending his miserable existence during the destruction of Eligos’ fortress; “Finally… My torment here is at an end. In flames, I am free of this world.”

Writer: Kevin Gunstone, Art: Paul Moore, and Colour: Stefan Mrkonjic