HELLFIRE – A comic about Good and Evil
HELLFIRE is a comic that illustrates the nuance of good and evil by pushing characters to the brink of their philosophies as they attempt to survive. This was achieved through research into manga, philosophy, and religious texts including consultation with a priest. This was done with consideration to how the topics brought up in the comic tie to our own reality in social and environmental ways.
As the world seems more divided than ever, absolute notions of black and white have permeated the political and social landscape, creating a divisive us and them mentality that has eroded the bedrock of civilizational maintenance and evolution, that being collaboration. In the face of such division, now more than ever must we remember the nuance of reality, of human beings, and understand that right and wrong, good and evil is ultimately a matter of perspective.
By confronting gruesome topics through the lens of survival, my comic examines how circumstance and desperation can force even the most damned of beings to relent to atrocity with regret and shame, reflecting a gleaming hint of potential virtue snuffed by a hostile environment. Simultaneously I make it clear that it is the actions that define the individuals, as through religious subversion in my comic, the demonic antagonist strives to create a better world with a kinder touch, despite the insurmountable task taking place in the damnedest of all places, hell.
The primary characters of my comic are in large part defined by the mythology surrounding them, Lucy (The Devil) being the icon of evil, and Maria being a demon. Their attempts at breaking away or indulging in the evil often assigned to who they are exemplifies the vices we battle and succumb to in the real world, external and internal. The way we work together and the times we resort to conflict mirrors the ways these characters try, but fail to collaborate, ultimately resulting in hell being hell, not out of happenstance or divine decree, but because they failed to come together and remained divided, resulting in a worse world for everyone regardless of color, sex, or belief.
I drew a lot of inspiration from the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 disaster, a plane crash in the Andes mountains that resulted in the consumption of several deceased people by the remaining survivors. The brutal conditions that must’ve led these people to transgress their moral values for the sake of survival were in my opinion nothing but heartbreakingly brave. But I wanted to amplify these extreme conditions to examine where the line of survivalist thinking reaches its breaking point. In Maria’s case, it’s when her duty to care for her children crashes headfirst into the consequences of keeping them alive. Consequences that aren’t just brutal and vile, but cosmic and existentially horrifying.
