REVIEW: ‘The Many Deaths of Laila Starr,’ Issue #2

The Many Deaths of Laila Starr #2 is a BOOM! Studios production written by Ram V, art by Filipe Andrade with assistance from Inês Amaro, and letters by AndWorld Design. The series follows the woes of the goddess of Death as she is fired from her job after the birth of a mortal who will invent immortality one day.

Without any doubt, The Many Deaths of Laila Star #2 is one of the best comics I have ever read. As Laila awakens from her most recent death, she encounters an 8-year-old Darius and canny bring herself to kill him, no matter how badly she wants her immortality and her job back. The issue is told through a conversation between Laila and Kah, a funeral crow whose job, equally threatened by the impending discovery of immortality, is to carry the souls of the dead to somebody in “Laila’s Department,” as he humorously puts it. A wise corvid, Kah and Laila discuss the nature of life and death as Laila witnesses Darius experience his own first encounter with death.

Both the conversation between the goddess and the crow and the experience Darius goes through are hauntingly beautiful. Never morbid or existential, it manages to describe death and experiencing death in such touching terms that even my death-phobic self was completely moved. My tears at the end were not shed because of the sadness of the experience, but rather, its beauty.

Artistically, the comic is just gorgeous. The series continues to astound me with its unique and gorgeous art style. The way that the slightly disproportionate bodies are drawn with thick lines and depict an array of body types and faces has enamored me from the start. But in this issue, it’s used to turn Bardham, a man that the young Darius looks up to into the god of a man he sees him as. The colors as well continue to give an otherworldly quality to the comic, which is particularly interesting on top of beautiful for how clearly the comic is about the reality of mortality despite its mythical conceit.

To this point in particular, it’s interesting the way that the majority of the comic is colored in this ethereal set of pinks and purples, giving that otherworldly feeling, but the scenes with Darius and Bardham, the myth of a man, they are largely colored in solid green colors. The greens feel really grounded, as if those panels are happening on a more tangible plane than everything else. It’s as if to say that Darius’s experiences with the mysterious and otherworldly Bardham, who in a sense, given his lower caste, is quite literally of another world, were the most real experiences of the boy’s youth. The bond he made was more real than that with any of his own family and so was the world he got to live in during their summers together.

The Many Deaths of Laila Starr #2 is an incredible comic in every regard. Its exploration of death and immortality is so beautiful and unexpected; I have never experienced a story like it. The writing is superb, the art is divine, and the comic is surely only just getting started. I cannot wait to see what Lailas many more lives deaths bring.

The Many Deaths of Laila Starr #2 is available wherever comics are sold.