Evil Ernie #2
Written by Jesse Snider
Art by Jason Craig
Covers by Ardian Syaf, Dan Brereton, Kyle Hotz, Stephen Segovia
Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: November 14, 2012
Cover Price: $3.99

Evil Ernie‘s origin story continues with issue #2, and what a friggin’ bloodbath! The goopy, fleshy parts of helpless sinners just drip off the page. Ernie goes on a rampage hunting down his father within a prison, and anyone who gets in Ernie’s way is subject to his wrath of violence. Well, anyone who’s a sinner; a prison complex is an all-you-can-maim buffet of sinners for Ernie to feast upon. Unfortunately, Ernie’s father is a slippery sonofabitch who may avoid meeting his maker.

Smiley plays a much more prominent role in this issue as Ernie’s cohort. While rampaging through the horde of sinners who attempt to take Ernie down, Smiley lets him in on a useful tidbit: all of Ernie’s violent awesomeness isn’t free–like a battery, he can run out of juice. Hmmm, I wonder what this giant hint is foreshadowing? Ernie is a living(?) hypocrite of an anti-hero. However, he revels in his hypocrisy and gleefully tells his victims that he’ll meet them in Hell. He’s one of them.

Evil Ernie #2 ends on a great cliffhanger that’ll leave you begging to know just how Jesse Snider plans to write himself out of that corner. The story in this issue is simplistic: Ernie seeks some revenge on his father, and as a bonus, he’ll attain his 666th murder. What sort of power will this ritual unleash? Who knows. By my count, Ernie is nearing kill 700 by the end of the issue. But really, the only one that matters is taking out his dick of a father.

Jason Craig continues his tremendously detailed work on Evil Ernie. His meticulously crafted violence is a perfect complement to the massacre occurring in the comic panels. Squishing the throats of sinners like a grape is never something to heavily abstract or cartoon. My one gripe is that a couple of the action sequences were difficult to follow. Later pages and dialogue cleared up the confusion, but it was frustrating to not quite understand what was occurring until you turned the page.

Evil Ernie #2 is the messy middle of the origin reboot. And by messy, I mean just a gory fucking mess. It’s a great, 90′s style, old school, splatterfest. I’m liking the Lady Death-less origin, and I’m loving the potential of this series. I’m anxious to see what Snider has in store once Evil Ernie hits its stride.