
About this work
John Henry Irons in a tense sequence that unfolds inside a church, as a confrontation with armed gang members spills into a funeral setting. The scene reflects Irons’s broader mission upon returning home to Washington, DC: dismantling Amertek, his former employer, after the company’s temporary superpower‑granting drug gave small‑time criminals the ability to cause disproportionate harm in his community. Executed in ink over blue pencil on DC Comics standard Bristol board, the page’s layouts emphasize physical struggle in the upper tier and moral reckoning in the lower panels, where dialogue underscores the cost of gang escalation and the violation of sacred space. Paste‑up text elements, production hole punches, and marginal editorial markings remain intact, preserving the material traces of 1990s superhero comic production and the transition era between fully analog and increasingly digital workflows. Signed by Kevin West in the bottom margin, the artwork occupies a key place in The Askia Jones Collection’s focus on Black superheroes, urban narratives, and the ways mainstream comics grappled with corporate responsibility and street‑level violence at the close of the twentieth century.