#1: "Angel"
#2: "Star Trek: TNG"

#3: "Silent Hill"

I'm a big fan of Silent Hill. I've played through the first, second, and fourth games in the series and am currently in the early-middle part of the third game. I have concerns about the fifth game, which is coming out soon, and I'd like to pick up "Origins", which is basically "zero" in the series. I own most of the soundtracks. I've seen the movie. I'd like to think that I have a pretty solid handle on what makes Silent Hill Silent Hill.

IDW has published a couple of Silent Hill comics. They've generally met with poor reviews. I think I know why.

I just read "Silent Hill: Sinner's Reward #1", and concluded that it's already following down the same road to ruin that the other Silent Hill comics have done. I really don't think the people who write these understand what makes this setting work.

The artwork isn't bad, per se. The art has been a problem in past issues, but I think that the art is a powerful consideration when making horror comics in general. Silent Hill has a very gritty, grainy appearance that is crucial to establishing the atmosphere, so at least IDW realizes that going with standard comic art (pencils, inks, colors) may not be the best approach. It could work, but it would take a great degree of skill, such as, for example, that possessed by my old Digital Coloring instructor, Brian Haberlin (and the pages in that link aren't the best examples of what I mean; I've seen a few of his pages that looked better). Instead, their artists use a painterly approach. So far, so good.

The trouble with the art that I've seen is that it's a little too obvious. There's no build up to the horrific things in Silent Hill, no shapes, silhouettes, suggestions of the Bad Things, all of the visual tricks a film director would use to build tension. Instead, it's just laid out for the reader to examine in detail right off the bat. For example, in "Sinner's Reward," our first sight of the supernatural is a splash page image of some guy's mangled body being lapped at by demon dogs, illuminated by a car's headlights. This image could have worked well, I think, if the artist used the stark illumination of the headlights to make silhouettes of the beasts, not showing the entirety of the grisly scene but rather letting the reader catch a glimpse of it. Granted, it's tougher to do such things in comics than in moving pictures, and the comics artist must always be concerned about clearly communicating what he's depicting, so if people look at these shapes and see only abstract shapes instead of, well, the suggestion of a horrid beast lapping at a ruined human body, the artist has failed. So it isn't easy in any case. However, in this case, the artist has opted to show us everything: the demon dogs standing over the body. They're pretty well illuminated (granted, they're in the protagonist's headlights) and fill the lower third of the page. Just kind of dumped into your lap. Not much horror, just a hope that the gore will get to you.

Problem #2. From what I've seen in the comics, the writers have slavishly reproduced the specific monsters from the games. Instead of finding yourself squeamishly fascinated by some surreal, disturbing, strangely familiar yet wholly alien construct of flesh, the reader says, "Oh, look, it's the Demon Dogs from Silent Hill 4." I think that kind of familiarity robs horror of its power. Granted, it's a Silent Hill comic, and you need to make connections to the original material so people don't feel like they're reading "Generic Horror Story With The Silent Hill Title Slapped On Comics". Also, making up monsters out of whole cloth is tough, and comics creators don't have the wealth of resource that, say, a professional video game design team might (I imagine), but the monstrosities that inhabit Silent Hill have a definite design ethic. With imagination, a writer/artist team should be able to create something new that's suitably vile while keeping the look of a Silent Hill beastie.

Problem #3. Now I'm getting back to the writing, which I think has one of the most grievous problems. "Sinner's Reward", right off the bat, suffers from two problems I can put my finger on. First, there is a narration. And it's wordy. Silent Hill is not film noir; there are occasionally voice overs, but never for long. So opening with the protagonist's inner voice telling us all about how hard it is being a hired killer and how he was raised by his father to be such is starting out on the wrong foot. Seriously, I could almost hear the lone saxophone wailing in the rain. Sin City, sure, but not Silent Hill. The story should rely as much as possible on visual narrative and include as little speech as possible. They also include a fair amount of profanity, which, aside from being a personal pet peeve, also further divorces the comic from its source material. The games don't have any swearing in them, and they prove that they don't need it (even though the voice acting and dialog, granted, isn't the greatest). The comics characters swear a lot. This brings me to...

Problem #4. I'm convinced that one reason the Silent Hill comics have had such a poor reception is that the protagonists are completely the wrong types of people. In the games, the protagonists have included a widowed single father, a widowed store clerk, a teenaged girl, a single young adult apartment renter, a truck driver, and (soon, in Silent Hill 5) a soldier recently returned from war. There is concern in Silent Hill fandom about this last character, because of the fear that the character's concept will turn the game into a Resident Evil shoot-em-up clone instead of the more pure survival horror of the other games. This should be a hint. The protagonists in the comics have included a soldier, a "sexy, gun-toting cheerleader," a small gang of criminals, and a mob hitman. Notice the common thread here? The protagonists in the games did come across guns and use them, but their character concepts generally wouldn't be described as "gun-toting." Again, the writers seem to be thinking of the wrong game franchise. At the least (and forgive me for using this term as a perjorative, a la my last Drawing class teacher), they're thinking too "comic-booky". Protagonists in Silent Hill are normal people, not action movie heroes and villains. They may have dark secrets and may have done questionable things in the past, but they're not blood-soaked, guns-a-blazin' stone cold killas. Much of the horror in the games results from totally normal people finding themselves spiraling into horribly desperate circumstances.

Okay, here are some visuals to help you understand how what has been done is all wrong.

Here are some pictures from the Silent Hill games:









Now, here are a couple of covers from the Silent Hill comics:





You see my point? Now, in the interest of full disclosure, that last cover depicts the villain of the story, but even that is all wrong: the villain is "the gun-slinging double-barreled terror known as the Grinning Man". Wow, a shirtless guy who smiles a lot and carries guns. Huh. You don't say. Maybe he should carry a katana to go with that trenchcoat.

Now, I'm not saying I could do the artwork on these. I'm no painter, and I'm still exploring digital coloring. I have serious concerns about my ability to draw a horror comic (and I really want to at some point), but I do think I could write a halfway decent one. I'm also fairly certain that I could write a Silent Hill comic that actually felt like Silent Hill, not Resident Evil or "Gun-Toting Punks Go To Supernatural Comeuppance Town."

Hire me!