Heck
When erstwhile high-school football hero Heck Hammarskjöld comes home for his father’s funeral, he reencounters former classmate Amy, whom he’d like to get to know again, while his old team’s water boy, Elliot, swarms all over him with renascent hero worship. But alluring Amy is married, annoying Elliot is persistent, and so when Heck takes over the creepy old house in which he grew up, the latter comes in handy with the cleanup job that uncovers a gate to hell on the premises. Five years later, newly widowed Amy becomes an early client of Heck’s new business of taking messages to hell and back. Cannon really runs with this setup, telling a morality tale within the trappings of a harrowing adventure that tests all three principals—Heck and, reduced by injuries during an infernal exploratory expedition to a mummy-like drone, Elliot down below and Amy up above. Cannon adopts Dante’s moral architecture pretty thoroughly, just simplifying it—not watering it down—for the purposes of his slighter conception. Sturdily drawn, a helluva good (i.e., virtuous) comics caper. --Ray Olson