Comic Book From Writers Of Hitman: Absolution Isn’t What You’d Expect

People love the Hitman games for the meticulous ways you can take out a target. Wear an outrageous outfit, slide in between the shadows and NPCs and perform an assassination with meticulous stealth. Yeaaah, there’s none of that in the new comic from two dudes who worked on the last game featuring Agent 47. It’s pretty much “insert sword into demon, dodge attack, shoot face off, repeat”, all of it drawn by an artist famous for gory action.

Nothing about 13 Coins is subtle. It’s drawn by Simon Bisley, the fan-favourite artist known for muscular, veiny, over-the-top work on Lobo, Judge Dredd and Danzig album covers. The series’ covers sport an impressive technological trick, in that they reveal a diorama-style depth-of-field when you drag your fingertip across the screen.

Written by Martin Brennan & Michael B. Jackson — who worked on Hitman: Absolution — the digital comic is essentially an occult horror action movie about a secret war being waged on earth by demons in hiding and the descendants of angels. The first two issues of 13 Coins come free when you buy the app for $US1. So far, the three issues released by publisher Corinthian are filled with plot points that you can see coming a mile away. But, oddly, that frees up a lot of room for a reader’s lizard brain to soak up the lurid artwork bleeding out of Bisley’s pen. There’s a weird cosmology layered into the reluctant hero plot beats and part of me will keep on reading just to see how messed up 13 Coins‘ versions of Heaven and Hell wind up being.