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

[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."