HELLHOLE is a new creator owned series by Scott Lobdell and
Adam Pollina, published through Image. The premise would
seem to be that it's an inner city slum which also has
problems with the supernatural. I think. Unfortunately,
this story takes so long to get going that it's hard to get a
handle on it.
What is immediately and disappointingly obvious, though, is
the appearance of two mismatched cops, one of whom is young
and kind of funky, and one of whom is older and wears a tie.
Yes, it's a buddy movie, and aside from the supernatural
trappings, I'm not convinced this series has anything to add
to the genre.
In fact, the general impression I get from this series is
that Lobdell and Pollina desperately want to be making a film
instead. The story is told in a highly unusual format, with
every page divided into three equally sized horizontal
panels, with subtitles instead of conventional lettering.
Not only are they subtitles, but they're scripts. Scripts,
even down to EXT. THE STREETS OF HELLHOLE, NIGHT at the
beginning of the story and DISSOLVE in a scene break.
It looks more like a storyboard than a comic.
But does it work? Frankly, I'm not sure it does, but I'm
also not sure what it's trying to achieve, so I'd have to
reserve judgement for a couple of issues. It definitely
distances the reader from the story, creating a very detached
and academic feel and reminding the reader repeatedly that
this is fiction. This is not normally a sensation that you
want to create unless you have real reasons for doing so. Is
this series going to turn into metafiction in a couple of
issues time? It seems rather unlikely.
Perhaps a more fundamental problem is that because of the
limited space it leaves for lettering, and the compulsory
three panels per page, the story moves at a snail's pace.
This is a standard 22 page story, but with a format like this
it could really have done with a double sized first issue to
give the story a head start.
As for the story, well, it hardly has a chance to get going.
There's somebody going round setting fire to people in a
mystical kind of way. At the end of the story, one of his
victims turns up again mysteriously reconstituted (though
still dead). And that's about it, really. Again, the pace
is the problem here. It may be that this style just isn't
suited for the monthly pamphlet format. Maybe the languid
pacing will read better in a trade paperback.
So, what are my conclusions, then? Really, I don't know
what the hell to make of this series. It's slow, and it's
got two whopping great cliches as its main characters. Yet
its got this very, very odd storytelling style that makes me
wonder if something bigger isn't just around the corner. If
there's a point to it, and it isn't just a gimmick, I'm
curious to find out what it is. The benefit of the doubt,
then, but there's not enough on offer here to let me be
truly enthusiastic.
