Writer: Rick Spears
Artist: Chuck BB
Company: Oni Press

More than a loving homage or simply parody, Black Metal manages to be a sincere love letter to heavy metal music as well as a humorous send-up of it. In many ways, Black Metal is what the various incarnations of the KISS comics should have been. Where the KISS comics are always so damn sincere about their goofy trappings, Spears and BB provide a wink and nod to the audience that they realize that this stuff can be seen as kind of goofy, but they do it in a way that recognizes the inherent stoner cool of the whole thing, and so it’s more of a fantasy/adventure comic than a humor book. While Black Metal is often laugh-out-loud funny, it is also pump your fist in the air awesome, a mixture of teen road trip and high fantasy quest decorated with the trappings of heavy metal.

Shawn and Sam, the twin brother leads of Black Metal, are memorable and fun characters. They’re hardly nice guys, but the reader feels sympathy for them because they’re the underdogs, the oddballs against the norm, and because their joy (however twisted) is just so damn sincere and infectious. These two boys, orphaned and adopted by a super-sweet mom (torture for goth souls like the twins), find their lives taking a change for the weirder, and thus in their eyes for the better, when they happen upon a vinyl record of Frost Axe, a viking metal band. The record turns out to be a power ballad detailing a war in hell, a lost sword and a quest for revenge, and before you can say “Wait… viking metal?” the boys are off on a crazy road trip to find the sword, meet the band, battle the lords of Hell and fulfill their destiny. Their might be some minor car theft and a cute goth metal girl along the way, too.

Chuck BB’s artwork is full of the kind of anarchic madness and dynamic storytelling necessary for the story at hand. One need only look at any given panel to see the expressions on his characters, especially the evil grins or open-mouthed looks of shock or despair on his twin protagonists, to see how much he brings to the story. There’s a ton of visual flair going on, as the panels are decorated with the perfect amount of motion lines and similar graphic elements, giving the whole package energy throughout. The vibe of the story is carried through in each panel, from the overwhelming laughter resonating as the jocks mock the boys to the casual barfing or sword chopping that shows that these two don’t do anything small or half-way.

Black Metal owes a debt to everything from Adult Swim to Scott Pilgrim, and you can trace its lineage from there back to the height of metal music in the ’80s, the videogames that so inform Pilgrim and the ’70s and ’80s cartoons that inform Adult Swim. Thanks to BB’s art style and Spears’ writing, Black Metal never feels retro or nostalgic, but those who have a touch of metal retro nostalgia will no doubt find a spiritual home in these pages.

Spears has a gift for dialogue that he has shown off in Pirates of Coney Island and Teenagers From Mars, and it’s in full bloom here, especially when it comes to the haughty frustration that drives so much of what Sam and Shawn have to say.Their patois, a mix of SNL’s Wayne & Garth, the stoner clique from every ’80s high school and the modern-day music snob, is hilarious to behold. Their acid-tongued barbs, launched at suburbia and mall culture, are nothing, however, compared to the awe and love they show to the heavy metal music and demonic trappings that soon become their lives. Despite their “more satanic than thou” attitude at the start, it’s hard not to find the boys’ genuine love of the culture they were really born into endearing.

If you’ve ever played a record backwards to see what was on there, if you’ve ever thrown the devil horns at the sound of a ripping guitar or drum solo, if you ever thought Ozzy was in league with Satan and that much cooler for it, than Black Metal, my friends, is for you.