Review time! with ‘Fire & Ice: When Hell Freezes Over’

“Won’t you look down upon me, Jesus? you’ve got to help me make a stand”

Well, I didn’t love the first Fire and Ice mini-series by Joanne Starer, but I decided to pick up the second one, just for fun, and it’s … well, it’s better than the first one, but it’s still not great. It’s decent enough, sure, but it still seems like Starer has a weird grasp on these characters that doesn’t quite work. Yes, my objections are based on what I like about the characters, especially Beatriz, but it also seems like she’s having trouble figuring out what makes these characters tick on her own basis. Anyway, let’s check this out. Fire & Ice: When Hell Freezes Over is drawn and colored by Stephen Byrne, lettered by Ariana Maher, and edited by Andrea Shea. It costs $17.99, it’s 122 pages, and it’s published by DC, of course.

As we know, Bea and Tora are now living in Kansas, which remains a dumb idea, but ok. They have had their powers switched thanks to Absolute Power, and they’re not handling it well. Bea, the former spy and woman who made (presumably) a lot of money commodifying herself on the internet, continues to be written as an idiot, as she wishes on a monkey’s paw to get their powers switched back. This is a woman who, without anyone telling her, knows that a monkey’s paw grants wishes, but is too stupid to remember the consequences of wishing on a monkey’s paw. Really. She and Tora then switch bodies and powers, so Bea’s brain is in Tora’s body, which has her powers back, and vice versa. Alles klar? In order to stop the magic, it turns out they have to go to Hell. Yay!

Starer does a decent job with Bea and Tora in Hell. We get some actual stakes and emotional moments, although the tone is light enough that we never really think things are going to be bad. Starer references their previous trip to Hell, and while she has to, that was such a devastating story that this can’t help but come up short compared to it. She doesn’t do a terrible job, and she does a pretty good job showing how close Tora and Bea are, which makes the book work a bit better. It’s also a bit funnier than the first one, as Tora and Bea aren’t impressed with Etrigan, and Starer has some good stuff with that. The Hell stuff isn’t bad, all in all. However, there are characters back in Kansas, where Bea accidentally switched everyone’s bodies, and they’re trying to fix that, too. That stuff is less successful, because it’s goofier and the characters aren’t as interesting. L-Ron is still there, and he teams up with a “woke-bro” who’s not as woke as he claims to be and is kind of evil, and Grodd shows up and beats up Superman for a bit and it all feels like Starer is just trying to fill pages. I’ve noticed this recently with superhero comics — hardly anyone can be a solo hero anymore. I guess the Punisher is, if you count him as a superhero, but it seems like nobody can just be alone or with one other person anymore. Maybe this has to do with the mania for 5- and 6-issue arcs — Bea and Tora in Hell could be a pretty tight 3-issue or, at the most, 4-issue story, but DC doesn’t want to do that, so Starer fills it with the shenanigans of the people in Kansas, and they’re just not that interesting. I like writers keeping more than one plot in the air for some time — this is called “Claremonting” — but only if the plots are intriguing and the characters are intriguing. The people in New Kooey aren’t quite that yet, so their issues — as related as they are to the main plot of Tora and Bea having switched powers and bodies — just doesn’t matter. Bea and Tora have a long history of being friends and being kind of opposite, but perhaps DC still doesn’t think a writer can make that a good series. So we get a lot of ancillary characters to plump out the issues, and the entire work suffers.

Sorry about this — I wish I liked these series better, because I dig Beatriz so much and Tora has shown that she, too, can be intriguing. Starer doesn’t make Bea quite as idiotic as she was in the first series, and Byrne’s art is pleasantly inoffensive — he does a pretty good job making the two ladies react nicely to their weird powers and then the body switch, but he doesn’t have the chops to quite nail the emotional stuff later on. Still, the book is nice to look at, and it’s not a bad comic, just kind of a bland one. I guess we’ll see if that’s enough to get DC to green-light another one and for me to buy it!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆