Blowtorch: Bad Roads #2 - Page1 Comics

BLOWTORCH: BAD ROADS No. 2, February 2024

It’s hard to imagine many readers perusing their local comic book store’s spinner racks and encountering a more downright brutal plot as the one Alfred Paige and Alex De-Gruchy collaboratively pen for Issue Two of “Blowtorch: Bad Roads”. Indeed, this twenty-two-page periodical arguably just picks its audience up by the scruff of the neck with it’s opening scene of a chairbound Richard Kinkaid being battered about the head, and simply never lets go until its blood-soaked bibliophiles are eventually brought back to the relative peacefulness of C.H.E.S.S. Headquarters in Colorado at its very end; “How was Bluegrass Country.? That good, huh…?”

Happily however, this excessive violence isn’t just gratuitous padding to help populate the publication. But actually shows how mercilessly murderous the Crime Cartel are who have abducted Blowtorch, and the sheer deadliness of the ex-Army Ranger they’ve foolishly decided to keep alive for questioning. Furthermore, the sense-shattering shenanigans employed by both sides of this contest to try and eliminate one another makes for some utterly compelling, high-octane action that results in this magazine being impossible to put down until the desperate gun battle is finally finished.

Perhaps this comic’s most compelling feature though, is that its titular character isn’t quite portrayed as an unstoppable, one-man killing machine, and instead actually requires the help of an undercover Drugs Enforcement Agent (DEA) for assistance. Admittedly, Will initially appears to free Kinkaid from a local barn simply to improve his own chances of escape now the investigator is convinced he’s “gonna end up at the bottom of a goddamn quarry.” Yet this basic show of compassion quickly blossoms into the man becoming Richard’s unlikely gun-toting comrade-in-arms – something which helps add to the increasing concern as to whether both government operatives are going to successfully survive the blazing firefight around them.

Likewise, Igor Kurilin’s marvellous black and white layouts do a first-rate job in capturing all the claustrophobic horror of a savage night-time shoot-out in and around a house. In fact, once Blowtorch has finally donned his famous flame-throwers, each prodigiously-pencilled panel provides a terrifying insight into just how dreadful it must be for anyone, even a heartless hoodlum, to be backed into a tiny room, crammed full of everyday furniture, and facing so inhumanly painful a fiery demise.

Creator: Alfred Paige, Script: Alex De-Gruchy, and Art: Igor Kurilin