Writer: Carmen Maria Machado
Artist: Dani
Colors: Tamra Bonvillain
Letters: Steve Wands
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: December 18th, 2019
The strange and mysterious past of a small town is now returning for two teenage girls in 1995, so crank up some Alice In Chains and dust off those flannel shirts!
Eldora and Octavia are two best friends in high school. El is our main character and narrator and it appears that she's got a thing for her English teacher. Vee is super smart and having a love affair with one of the popular girls at school.
We first meet them waking up in the theater at the end of a movie called Sea Dogs, which is the name of the story that has two pages at the end of every Hill House comic. They fell asleep during the previews and don't remember what happened. Vee has mud on her boots that wasn't there before, and in her memory (but not El's) she does see a silhouette of a man in what looks like the door to the theater room. El feels sick and throws up. The only employee there is Josh, who they go to school with, and he claims to not know what happened. But he does act creepy when he asks if they enjoyed the movie. Did Josh slip them a roofie?
Vee rides on the back of El's bicycle as they head home, and a rabbit jumps out and makes them crash. That rascally rabbit could have done it on purpose because we see a rabbit watching them as they leave the theater and get on the bike! Some big creepy deer with human features (it reminds me of the monster thing in The Ritual) comes out of the woods and goes after them, but they jump back on the bike and escape.
These strange events lead to them remembering the strange story of the town. It was a coal-mining town, and there were tales from years ago that women would forget blocks of time and wake up in weird places. When girls hit puberty they would wake up in the church parking lot, having no clue of what happened. Eventually, a fire in the mines went raging for years, and most people left the town as the mining company bought their land.
The next day at school we learn more about our two main characters. And after school, El drives Vee over to her secret girlfriend's house to get laid. That night as Vee and Jessica lay in bed, it looks like a streak of fire comes down from the sky and goes into Vee's finger. Weird. El's narration goes on about birds warning us with their songs and silence, which is completely true. We as humans have an evolutionary trait with birds: if they're singing then it's safe so it calms us, if they're silent then there's a predator near so we get nervous. The fire did kind of look like a bird but I guess we won't know what this means for the story until the next issue.
Anyways, Vee gets up to wash her hands in the bathroom because WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED TO MY HAND but when she comes back, what's going on with a sleeping Jessica is even weirder.
Bits and Pieces
This, of course, is a character development issue so we get to know who Vee and El are, their social lives, their family situations, and the history of the town that they live in. I like the time setting, and the art and overall style of the book looks like it could come from a 1995 indie comic. The deer thing does seem out of place with the rest of what's going on such as memory loss and an underground fire, but the issue does what it's supposed to do: invest me in the characters and the story and make me interested in moving forward.
7.5/10
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