That Texas Blood: Hell Comes to Allison Ranch #1 Review: Trouble Runs Deep

WEPAAAA! That Texas Blood is back, and Chris Condon and Jacob Phillips waste absolutely no time reminding us why this book hits different. Hell Comes to Allison Ranch #1 does not come riding back into town screaming for attention. Nah. It pulls up slow, lets the dust settle, gives you a good look at everybody standing around the ranch, and then starts tightening the screws until you realize something ugly has been sitting underneath all that Texas dirt the whole damn time. That is the sauce with this series. Condon and Phillips know the loud stuff means more when the quiet stuff has already made you uncomfortable.

We are in March 2003, with Sheriff Joe Bob Coates and Deputy Wilson Hart getting pulled toward the Allison Ranch, the kind of place where money has been around long enough to become its own weather system. The Allison family has land, power, history and enough old resentment floating around to poison the water table. Condon does not rush into the family drama with a giant exposition dump either. He lets conversations breathe. People interrupt each other, dodge questions, say one thing while their faces are telling you something completely different. You start picking up who trusts who, who is tired of whose nonsense and where the pressure points are before the book ever needs to announce, “Yo, this family is a mess.” We know. We can feel it.

Joe Bob remains the perfect set of eyes for this world because he is not written like some superhero sheriff who walks into every room and magically knows the answer. He listens. He watches. Sometimes he looks like he would rather be anywhere else, but the gears are always moving. Condon has gotten damn good at writing characters who sound like people instead of plot-delivery machines, and that matters even more here because this first issue is doing a lot of setup without feeling like setup. Wilson Hart brings a different temperature to the scenes, and watching the two lawmen navigate personalities around Allison Ranch gives the issue a low-key procedural rhythm before everything starts leaning toward something nastier.

Yo, Jacob Phillips, man, this dude understands Texas on the page. Not postcard Texas. Not cowboy-hat-and-a-beer-commercial Texas. His Texas feels lived in, sunburned, dusty, lonely and just a little haunted even when nothing supernatural is happening. The faces carry mileage. Rooms feel occupied instead of decorated. Trucks, diners, ranch interiors and open stretches of land all have weight because Phillips never treats the environment like filler behind the dialogue. The place is part of the crime scene before there is even a crime scene. That is visual storytelling doing its damn job.

The color are a monster throughout the issue. Daylight scenes lean into those baked yellows, oranges and sickly greens that make the heat feel like it is sitting right on your neck, then the nighttime material drops into these deep blues and bruised purples where headlights, windows and little pockets of artificial light suddenly become important. When the temperature of the story changes, the palette changes with it. Phillips does not need some giant neon sign saying DANGER because the page already told your eyes before your brain caught up. Pip Martin’s color assists deserve the credit too, because the visual consistency across the issue is tight as hell.

What got me is the pacing. This book is patient without dragging its boots. Condon lets us spend time with the people around the Allison family, but every conversation is adding another little splinter. A look here. An old grievance there. Somebody saying just enough to make you wonder what they decided not to say. By the time the issue starts cashing in some of that tension, it feels earned instead of manufactured. You are not waiting around for the comic to finally “get good.” The tension is the good shit, and the eventual escalation lands because these creators bothered to build the damn fuse first.

Phillips also knows exactly when to get out of the way of a moment. Some pages carry dense conversations and tight character work, while others open up and let geography, silence or a single image do the talking. That variation keeps the issue moving without making the storytelling flashy for the sake of showing off. Panel transitions are clean, expressions do a ton of heavy lifting, and when violence threatens to enter the room, the compositions start feeling less comfortable before anybody has to tell you why. Comics are a visual medium, people. This is what I am always talking about. The art is not illustrating Condon’s script. It is telling the story right alongside it.

Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s lettering deserves love because this is a dialogue-heavy issue and it never feels crowded. Conversations remain easy to follow, sound effects actually belong to the environment, and the lettering knows when to push forward and when to disappear into the page. That might sound like small potatoes until you read a comic where everybody’s balloons are fighting the artwork for oxygen. Here, the whole creative team is moving in the same direction. Nobody is trying to win the page from anybody else.

Now, if you are coming into Hell Comes to Allison Ranch expecting twenty-two pages of bodies dropping and ranch-house mayhem because “Hell” is sitting right there in the title, slow your roll. This is Part One of a six-issue story, and Condon and Phillips are laying track. But they are laying good track. There is enough character tension, mystery and creeping menace here to make the final stretch hit hard, and that last movement leaves Joe Bob staring at exactly the kind of situation that makes you say, “Aight, now we got problems.” No spoilers from me. Just understand the peaceful version of Allison Ranch has an expiration date.

As a return to That Texas Blood, this is exactly what I wanted. The book still trusts the reader. It still understands that crime stories are about people before they are about blood on the floor, and it still has that grimy, sun-baked personality that separates it from a rack full of comics trying way too hard to look dangerous. New readers can absolutely walk in here because Condon gives you what you need without turning the issue into homework, while longtime readers get Joe Bob Coates back in his natural habitat, driving toward trouble because apparently retirement and peace were never invited to the barbecue. Wepa! The ranch is already simmering, and if this first chapter is the temperature check, somebody better keep the fire department on speed dial.

CRUSADERS SCORE:
4.5/5

Written by: Chris Condon
Art by: Jacob Phillips
Letters by: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
Color Assists by: Pip Martin
Backmatter Design by: Michael Tivey
That Texas Blood Logo Design by: Sean Phillips
Publisher: Image Comics