Silent Hill: Past Life #1

[stolisomancer]

The Silent Hill series, like most everything else, got a fair share of spinoffs once it got popular. The comics, however, were almost all awful, as one of the abiding characteristics of Silent Hill tie-ins is that they're inevitably done by people who don't understand why the games work as well as they do. The key is that the best games in the series are more psychological than anything else, and the people working on Silent Hill: Past Life seem to actually get that.

Past Life began a few months ago, and is set in the years immediately following the Civil War, when Silent Hill and the towns surrounding it are still small and largely unremarkable. Jebediah, a former soldier and outlaw with a violent past, is coming to Silent Hill with his pregnant wife Esther to make a fresh start.

Silent Hill loves that kind of thing.









The art changes here for a few pages from Menton J. Matthews to Riley Rossmo. Menton3 does the art for most of the rest of the series.

Comments

[mullon]

Why does every goddamn Silent Hill comic look like that? Is clear art so much to ask?

[stolisomancer]

I've wondered that myself, since a lot of IDW artists seem to be badly imitating Ben Templesmith, but I actually quite like the Menton pages here. They're very atmospheric, which is important for the kind of environment Silent Hill depends upon.

[q99]

I think whoever runs the SH line thinks it's scary/atmospheric.

[nezchan]

You misspelled "ruins".

[q99]

Zing :)

Yea, they really don't get the games. And mostly give work to one particular author who did a long series of non-SH style stories (which Linkara reviewed a lot of).

[nezchan]

Seriously. The first bit looks pretty good, except they forgot to actually paint a few characters so we still see the sketch, and then the rest kinda looks like thumbnails with a couple of dabs of colour to make it look like they were supposed to be that way.

[darkknightjrk]

"The first bit looks pretty good, except they forgot to actually paint a few characters so we still see the sketch"

It looks more like a stylistic quirk--like his version of negative space or shadow or something.

[nezchan]

I'll give it that, although it's not consistent. It works on the first scan, where Jebediah tells Esther to STFU, and she literally pales, which diminishes her on the page. And it works well to separate the dialogue bits on the second page, but on the third it just seems sort of random. in any case, I wouldn't complain if the whole thing was like that instead of basically storyboards.

[darkknightjrk]

Could also be random, too--like he went, "Eh...this panel's looking a little boring...oh, I'll just leave that person without any marks."

[wizardru]

Motto. Every Silent Hill comic I've ever seen seems to favor either this sketchpad nonsense or super stylized portraits. It's ugly and unclear and the worst possible thing when all you're doing is TALKING HEADS. There's a little bit of tension here, but not enough to make it interesting.

[icon_uk]

I'm liking the Menton3 style...

[darkknightjrk]

Same here--it's like Adi Granov and Dave McKean had an art-baby and fed it a steady supply of magic mushrooms.

[just_kazari]

I like the Menton style.. it's a bit clearer than the other SH comics were. And then it switched artists and went back to being 'artsy' while sacrificing clear and non-eye-hurting narrative.

[darkknightjrk]

Man...leave it to Silent Hill to make a line about racial equality sound hella creepy in its context.

[sindra]

What's funny is that its a tie into the new SH game that's coming out, "Downpour".

Ties like that, and the little nod to Homecoming, make stuff like this beautiful to me.

[darkknightjrk]

Oh, they're making a new one? I haven't followed that series since the original developers left.

[stolisomancer]

Yeah, Downpour's by a new Czech studio. The trailer's available and looks pretty decent.

[sindra]

Yeeeees! I was hoping someone would post scans of this on here and my prayers were answered!

I was fortunate enough to read a in-depth review over at helldescent.com, and this sounds like the closest thing to the atmosphere of original games as we could hope for.

I'll wait for a trade to be made, but I will definitely pick this line up.

[likeaminx]

I feel like the only person in the world who enjoyed the Silent Hill comics.

Actually, I should amend that. I liked Silent Hill: Paint It Black . The rest of it... Eh, not so much. But Paint It Black is really fun for me. The art is pretty awesome too.

ANYWAY on topic, this series shows promise.

[stolisomancer]

Paint It Black just seemed to utterly miss the whole point of the series, or at least I remember thinking that upon attempting to read it.

[likeaminx]

Maybe. I liked that the town was keeping someone hostage but not outright trying to murder them though. It was an interesting change of pace. (But that might be why you thought that so, you know, YMMV)

[stolisomancer]

Hm. Looking it up, I was thinking of Dying Inside. I may have to look up Paint It Black.

[likeaminx]

Oh Dying Inside.... Yeah. Paint It Black had nothing to do with Dying Inside though the main character in Paint It Black shows up in Dead/Alive for some reason and completely ruins the ending he got in Paint It Black IMO

[blackruzsa]

I like the art for its style matching the feel of the comic.
Bah, I may wanna buy this.