ANGEL AND FAITH #7 Review

“ANGEL AND FAITH” continues to delight us readers. Christos Gage says his writing seems to have kicked in with Issue 5 but I think he’s been on a roll all along. Rebekah Isaacs draws like a masterful demon! Gage and Isaacs are a dream team to say the least together making the lead characters, the story, everything so appealing. With Issue 7, we reach Part Two of “Daddy Issues” which lives up to the promise of its opener.

We’ve got quite a mangnificent creature to contend with in this current arc, the Lorophage Demon. In Issue 6, it was depicted in all its viloent glory in a flashback to Giles in his schoolboy days. Back then, Giles and his fellow trainees were in a Hogwarts type of academy and, for one exam, they had to match wits with the demon. With its bulging head, red glowing eyes, and proboscis, it looks like it just stepped out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. These suckers are truly suckers! They feed on trauma and so, in theory, they could suck all the bad memories right out of you and have fed for the night. Win/Win, right? Wrong. These critters suck and suck and suck until you’re dead. However, as a certain other baddie has found out, it’s quite possible to teach one of these things to hold back a little and not kill its prey. This would bring the Win/Win scenario back into play and that is what Drusilla believes she has done.

If you read the last issue, then it will be fresh in your mind as to who Drusilla is. She is a victim of Angel when he was the decadent psychopath, Angelus. Back in 1860, Angelus devoured all of Drusilla’s family, and made a special meal out of her. She became one of the undead and lost her mind. A hundred and fifty years go by pretty quick, Angelus is no more and all that is left is Angel who is really, really sorry for what he’s done. Is that even close to good enough for Drusilla? Uh, no, not really. So, that brings us back to her experiments with Lorophage demons. She sure seems to have gotten the hang of how to control them. The problem is that this whole thing is too good to be true. Those people who go through the process of “losing” their trauma, have actually lost a part of their souls. You take the good with the bad, right? You can’t just have the bad sucked right out of you, now, can you?

In this issue, given the title, we further explore the relationship between Faith and her ne’re-do-well father. Now, Drusilla has her daddy issues being the sire of Angel but Faith has her own issues too. Her dad has tracked her down to London and looks mighty repentant. A drunkard all his life, he swears up and down that he’s changed, this time for good. Faith is NOT buying that. But, then for some strange reason, Angel urges her to give the old guy a break and she turns around and runs after her dad full of forgiveness. Where’s that headed? Well, you may be right to suspect this is not going to work out.

Now, for the bonus item, and you fans will have to help me. There is one panel which makes a reference to something that is a bit unclear to me. Drusilla and Angel have their big confrontation. She has put him on the defensive and, in this scene, tears his shirt off. She then appears to point at his right nipple and it looks like he’s looking right down at it too. And she says, and I quote, “The tooth of Ammut, devourer of ancient Egyptian souls!” She is pleased that he has “merged it” to his flesh. Jeesh, so does Angel wear a spooky relic on his right nipple? Well, stranger things have happened. It doesn’t look bad on him, if that’s what it is.