Review: 'Let This One Be A Devil' by Tynion IV, Foxe, & Kowalski

James Tynion IV & Steve Foxe's Let This One Be A Devil (Dark Horse Comics, 2025), with art by Piotr Kowalski, is a four issue limited series about the Jersey Devil. As with both installments of Tynion's Project Blue Book (Dark Horse Comics, 2023 & 2024), Let This One Be A Devil is simply a retelling of the legend wrapped in a flimsy narrative framing device. In this case a young man named Henry Naughton returns to his parental home in the New Jersey Pine Barrens following the death of his father. This coincides with an outbreak of Jersey Devil sightings and, despite being a native, Henry is somehow ignorant of the legend allowing the readers to learn it along with him.

Issue no. 1 is the classic story of the Jersey Devil as the 13th child of a belabored pioneer wife (McCloy & Miller Jr., 1998).

Issue no. 2 is an encapsulation of Bill Sprouse and Brian Regal's arguments about the historicity of the legend being rooted in a printing press feud between Daniel Leeds and Benjamin Franklin, plus Joseph Bonaparte's apocryphal encounter with the Devil (Sprouse, 2013; Regal 2013; McCloy & Miller Jr., 1998, p. 28).

Issue no. 3 is a brief retelling of the January 1909 flap as well as Norman Jeffries' infamous kangaroo hoax (McCloy & Miller Jr., 1998, p. 29-32 & 71-2) while Issue no. 4 brings the story to a close, with a gesture towards Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark's psychogeographical supposition that the Jersey Devil is the Pine Barrens itself and any weird thing that might be seen or experienced there (Coleman & Clark, 1999, p. 120-21). The last few pages end on a surprisingly saccharine note that recalls Jacques Derrida's famous declaration that "Monsters cannot be name... without immediately turning the monsters into pets" (1989, p. 80).

While I know that Tynion's True Weird series for Dark Horse doesn't exist in the same continuity as his Department of Truth series for Image Comics, with all three installments I've found that True Weird nevertheless feels oddly supplementary to DOT. In this case a reader can get the exact same information on the Jersey Devil by reading the cryptid's entry in Tynion's DOT: Wild Fictions companion volume. The only thing you'll be missing out on by not reading Let This One Be A Devil is Kowalski's excellent art.

Bibliography

• Coleman, Loren & Jerome Clark. Cryptozoology A to Z (Simon & Schuster, 1999)
• Derrida, Jacques. "Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and other small Seismisms". Ed. David Carroll, The States of Theory (Columbia UP, 1989), p. 63–94.
• McCloy, James F. & Ray Miller Jr. Phantom of the Pines: More Tales of the Jersey Devil (Middle Atlantic Press, 1998)
• Regal, Brian. "The Jersey Devil: The Real Story" Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 37, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 2013): Web.
• Sprouse, Bill. The Domestic Life of the Jersey Devil: or, BeBop's Miscellany (Oyster Eye Publishing, 2013)
• Tynion IV, James, Steve Foxe, and Piotr Kowalski. Let This One Be A Devil (Dark Horse Comics, 2025)