Broken Frontier

Last week’s Maxwell the Demon did the Inferno justice through clever storytelling, a sinful amount of style and a satirical spin on Heaven, Hell and everything in between. New kid on the block Soul’d seems to be doing roughly the same, though here, Hell has nothing of the mundane.

Soul’d follows aspiring singer Bernadette, who made the journey to Dunbar Dancing for her big break and instead finds a “career in custodial arts”, while all around her, lesser talented bimbos find their big breaks – falling off of greased stripper poles. We’re told from the Top Webcomics entry that Bernadette eventually sells her soul for fame and fortune, but the current plotline is just covering the bare basics of the Inferno machinery, and has yet to reach the aforementioned Faustian pact.

The great thing about Soul’d is, while the soul-selling will surely provide a much needed catalyst shot in the arm, the webcomic might not really need it. Angela Bowman’s world is certainly more depressing than Maxwell’s, but made all the more disturbing since it’s our world, not Hell’s. Bowman’s Bernadette strikes a tough pose between hapless dreamer and wry wannabe. Without her vulnerable yet invaluable perspective, this webcomic's dry humor wouldn’t work nearly as well.

The art is perfectly matched with the gritty mundanity of modern life, while also illustrating the aforementioned balance between Bernadette’s glass ceiling inspiration and molten grounded reality. Hell has only really appeared for two pages, but already there’s a shift at work here in comparison to Maxwell. In the latter, Hell, Heaven and Earth all have distinctive atmosphere, but here, they may very well be all the same!

There’s not much of a downside to Soul’d because there’s really not that much to the webcomic just yet – barely more than a chapter has been posted. Still, all the basics are there including an easy-to-navigate archive as well as future spaces for galleries, character profiles and more. The sooner these pages are added, the richer the webcomic experience will be.

Overall, Soul’d is a freshman webcomic outing which is off to a good start. It’s shot from the back-pages of Top Webcomics to the mid-200s without too much effort. Let’s hope demonic intervention won’t be necessary to push this promising piece higher!