Broken Frontier

Demons are probably the only thing that turn up in webcomics more than catgirls. Mostly they appear as enemies and general cannon fodder, but once in a while a webcomic comes along to follow the ho-hum day-to-day routine of the Inferno.

So the idea of literally writing like hell in webcomics isn’t an entirely original one. The problem is, even if you’re as good with humor as you need to be to write a strip which takes place in Hell, well, you’re still writing a story about Hell, which is bound to get tedious and depressing no matter how you try to slice it.

Fortunately, Tonia Walden’s Maxwell the Demon seems to have cured at least some of these faults. First, it contains more of a semi-regular story than the typical see-what’s-going-on-in-Hell-today approach. The one-page format does well to tell a better story about Hell as opposed to the span of a couple panels, and every so often the story is told in two or three installment chunks as opposed to just one.

What really saves Maxwell the Demon (no pun intended) is the variety of the settings. Not only do you have Maxwell’s senior work in Hell, but also his relationship with his human wife Claire as well as his angelic counterpart Gabe.

Maxwell himself is an interesting character – a demon of almost Lovecraftian proportions stuffed into the body of man, his two sides seem always at conflict, whether it’s scaly tentacles breaking free of his business suit or his geeky film affection showing out in the circles of Hell. Gabe is often the same way – the Biblical, Miltonic angel struggling to fit into a suit-and-tie world which is every bit as bureaucratic as Maxwell’s.

Among the webcomic’s most notable fault, though, is the lack of detail surrounding Claire. Who is she? How did she come to be married to a demon, and what is her day-to-day routine like on the human world? This also plays into the need of a profiles page of some sort explaining the various characters to new readers, as Walden’s shift from Hell to spacious high-rise apartment is extremely jarring, and even a little bit confusing.

With great, stylized art and a fresh perspective to a potentially-done-to-death (and worse) scenario, Maxwell the Demon is definitely one which deserves a look for fans of Dante searching for a laugh somewhere in the Inferno.