Meet Dr. Inayah Jibril, a Muslim woman and expert on the occult’s darkest recesses. She’s so stone cold and no-nonsense that she makes John Constantine look like one of the Ghostbusters. In The Sacred Damned #1 (written by Sabir Pirzada with art by Michael Walsh), we see her work the interesting and horrific case of Kyle Grassman, a college student and star football player.
The book leans heavily into body horror in its opening pages, as we watch athletic Kyle suddenly start to gain fat, his weight increasing by 50 pounds, 100 pounds, then 200 pounds. A guy who was once a physically perfect, handsome lady-killer transforms into a guy who can barely get out of bed and walk. Anyone who has involuntarily gained weight can sympathize with him, that feeling that your body and the world are out of control. And it only gets worse for him when he finds out what he’s been eating in the frequent times he blacks out. Could it be some form of demonic possession?
Enter Dr. Jibril, and what an entrance it is! Michael Walsh’s art not only conveys the gross and terrifying ordeal Kyle’s going through, it also gives personality and depth to Dr. Jibril. She enters the story on a splash page, standing with her hands on her hips. It’s not necessarily a heroic pose, but it still speaks volumes. Just from that one page alone you can tell that she’s brilliant, assured, and doesn’t suffer fools lightly.
Writer Sabir Pirzada briefly pauses the story to drop tidbits of information about her, including notes from a podcast interview she did and one of her childhood drawings (which shows that she’s been wrestling with the occult for most of her life). It’s enough to give you insights into her depths of knowledge and her background, but still keep her wonderfully mysterious.
Image Comics
She takes a “tough love” approach to helping Kyle, which plays out through the second half of the book. Once she diagnoses his problem, she’ll still have a struggle getting him to believe her and do what she says because after all, Kyle was a know-it-all, super popular guy on campus a few months ago and that level of narcissism is hard to shake. There’s a battle of wills between the two before the REAL battle starts.
So many horror stories are steeped in Western religion, especially Catholicism (The Omen, The Nun, The Exorcist, and countless other copycat films). It’s fascinating to see a Muslim main character and a supernatural threat based in Islamic myth. I thought I was familiar with Djinn, but I realized I really didn’t know squat about them as I read the issue. You’ll learn so much about Djinn here as well as other mythical creatures from Islamic tales. And once they physically appear, they’re terrifying and the showdown between them and Dr. Jibril is riveting.
This book is part of Image’s The Horizon Experiment series, where each issue in the series serves as a “pilot”. If an issue is popular and sells well, it will be spun off into its own miniseries or ongoing series. I hope The Sacred Damned continues and we get to see more of Dr. Jibril in the future. If you love a great horror story with a unique lead character, pick this book up, you won’t be disappointed.
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