EVENT HORIZON: INFERNO #5 REVIEW – THE FINAL DESCENT INTO HELL DOES NOT PULL ITS PUNCHES!

Event Horizon: Inferno #5 reaches the end of the trip, and if you were expecting Christian Ward to suddenly turn the lights on, hand everybody a warm blanket, and apologize for the trauma, you have clearly entered the wrong spacecraft. This finale takes everything the series has been building around the Event Horizon, Daniel Durante, Skylar, Starck, and the ship’s impossible relationship with Hell and squeezes it into one ugly red nightmare where survival is not the same thing as escape.

Ward wastes almost no time getting everybody moving. The ship is shifting around the characters, paths refuse to stay where they belong, and the idea of physical space has basically quit its job. That gives the first half a nasty forward momentum because even standing still feels dangerous. Characters are trying to find one another while the Event Horizon keeps separating, tempting, and psychologically attacking them. It feels less like people running through corridors and more like the ship rearranging a digestive tract around its food.

The strongest part of Ward’s script is that the supernatural horror remains personal. The Event Horizon mythology can get enormous very quickly, with Hell dimensions, resurrection, demonic entities, and all kinds of cosmic nightmare fuel, but this chapter keeps returning to choices. Who gets left behind? Who goes back? Who accepts what they have become? Who keeps pretending control is still possible? Daniel Durante’s obsession has been driving the series, and the finale lets that obsession reach exactly the kind of destination it deserves without reducing everything to a simple monster fight.

Rob Carey’s artwork is nasty in all the right ways. Bodies stretch into the architecture, black tendrils crawl through red spaces, corridors become organic traps, and human figures are constantly being dwarfed by whatever the ship is becoming around them. Carey uses a lot of silhouettes and hard framing to keep the violence readable, which matters because the pages are deliberately oppressive. There is so much texture, tissue, cable, shadow, and infernal debris that a less disciplined artist could turn the whole issue into red soup.

Xenon Honchar’s colors are basically a warning siren for twenty-plus pages. Red dominates, but it is not one flat red wash. There are dirty crimsons, hot orange bursts, black voids, sick flesh tones, and occasional cold blues that hit like somebody opened an emergency hatch into another emotional temperature. The coolest trick is how the blue material near the end suddenly feels almost peaceful simply because your eyeballs have spent so long being assaulted by Hell. That contrast makes the escape beats feel physical.

Alex Ray’s lettering has to sit inside some extremely busy pages, and the placement keeps the dialogue readable without making characters feel like they are calmly chatting in a nightmare. Screams, commands, overlapping voices, and blunt little exchanges all maintain their rhythm. Ward also knows when to let Carey and Honchar handle the horror without filling every image with explanation, which gives the nastier reveals room to hit.

The finale is not flawless. There are a few places where the supernatural rules and character histories arrive quickly enough that readers who have not been following the series closely are going to get launched out an airlock. This is absolutely issue five, not a friendly jumping-on point, and Ward is more interested in paying off the people who have been reading than explaining the entire mythology again. I think that is the right call for a finale, but the density does occasionally make certain emotional turns land a little faster than I wanted.

What I really appreciate is that the ending understands Event Horizon. A story tied to this property should not close with everybody smiling at the camera because evil has been safely filed away. Victory needs contamination. Escape needs a question mark. Somebody should get what they wanted and immediately discover that was the worst possible outcome. The final pages deliver that flavor without simply copying the movie’s ending beat for beat.

Inferno #5 is violent, claustrophobic, visually hostile, and committed to the idea that the Event Horizon itself is more than a haunted ship. It is a machine that has learned how to weaponize desire. Ward and Carey bring the series home with enough answers to make the journey feel worthwhile while leaving the door to Hell cracked exactly as far as it should be.

CRUSADERS SCORE:
4.5/5

Writer: Christian Ward
Artist: Rob Carey
Colorist: Xenon Honchar
Letterer: Alex Ray
Editor: Nicolas Nino
Publisher: IDW Publishing