All first issues should be this good.
Creative Staff:
Story: Peter Tomasi
Art: Ian Bertram
Colors: Dave Stewart
Letters: Nate Piekos
What They Say:
IT’S NOT JUST THE HOUSE THAT’S HAUNTED . . .
The Winchester House—famous for its original owner’s bizarre compulsion to incorporate a multitude of architectural curiosities. But as the bereaved Sarah Winchester’s workers toil on stairways to nothing and doors to nowhere, a mysterious stranger arrives . . . and he could make Sarah’s demons all too real.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The Winchester House exists just as much in fiction as it does in fact. The house (which you can book a tour of), was built by Sarah Winchester, the wife of the man who invented the famous Winchester rifle. Mrs. Winchester believed in spirits, both good and bad, and directed the building of the house to accommodate the good ones and repel the bad. Work went on day and night, often with no reason other than to continue the construction, birthing stairs and doors that lead to nowhere.
Supposedly Mrs. Winchester held nightly séances to determine the best way to direct construction the next day, and this is where we get into the lore. Some say that she built the house to fool the angry spirits of the people killed by her husband’s gun. The doors and stairs would lead the ghosts nowhere, thereby protecting Mrs. Winchester. Supposedly, she slept in a different bedroom every night and demanded that the construction go on day and night, nonstop.
Whether or not Mrs. Winchester was truly haunted by ghosts is beyond my means to answer, but it makes for a good story, and certainly has inspired its fair share, with House of Penance being the most recent.
The issue mostly serves to set up the story. It introduces us to the characters, the situation, and—most importantly—the house. We see how Mrs. Winchester runs her house, what the workmen think of her, and see that the house tends to draw certain people into its orbit. People like Warren Peck, who arrives at the house in the middle of the night, bleeding, ornery, asking for a bed for a few nights. The foreman, Mr. Murcer, allows it, but under one condition: Peck must give up his guns. That’s the one inviolable rule of the house.
Although nothing has happened yet, the tension in the book is palpable and Peck’s arrival feels like a burning match thrown in a puddle of gasoline. Every aspect of this comic feels tense and ragged. Instead of nice, clean borders, the panels look ragged and jagged, sometimes straining against sound effects and bleeding into the gutter. The characters, by comparison, feel small somehow, as if they’re trying so hard to keep everything in that they compress in on themselves like black holes. You especially see it in their eyes. Mrs. Winchester’s eyes are wide, ovular, and set far apart on her face, unnerving to look at straight on. Her eyes seem to act as windows to her madness. Peck’s eyes, on the other hand, are constantly hooded, perhaps doing a better job of keeping his own madness (and he is mad, or at the very least sociopathic) inside.
Atmosphere makes or breaks a horror story, and there’s atmosphere to spare in this comic. Tomasi bridges fact and fiction to give us a complicated portrait of a woman not entirely in control of herself. A woman whose madness radiates, drawing certain people to her, like the flame does the moth. It certainly draws in readers like me.
Bertram’s art similarly radiates. It’s almost like a fever-heat. His figures border on the ugly and grotesque, and violence seems to lurk beneath the exterior of, well, pretty much everything. In particular Bertram seems to like to draw hands. Mrs. Winchester’s are gnarled, desiccated digits wrapped in wrinkled skin. The workers’ hands are strong and fat, and Peck’s hands seem nimble and prone to violence and theft.
Of course, this story won’t work unless the house was just as fascinating, beguiling, and offputting as its owner. Bertram gives us a full-page spread to introduce the house. It hovers over a town, dwarfing it as it sprawls upwards and outwards, like a Lego house where a child builds wing after wing, room after room, defying all logic or sense of design, building for the sheer joy—or compulsion—to build. Surrounding the house like hovering spirits are “Blam” “Blam” “Blam”: the sounds of hammers doing their thing, reminiscent of the sound a gun makes when fired.
Bertram really knows how to block and set a scene. That first picture of the house is emblematic of his art, and serves as my favorite panel/page in the issue. My second favorite comes when Peck literally arrives at a fork in the road. The right side seems sunny and nice. Green trees line a clear path and a town clearly pops up in the distance. The left side, however, is lined with gnarled, twisting, leafless trees leading to an oval opening not unlike a womb. Peck chooses the lefthand path, saying that it’s “…an obvious [choice] at that.” Whether he takes this path because he felt the other was too good to be true, or because he understood his nature enough to know that the darker route was the correct one is unknown, but it’s a beautifully drawn scene that in the hands of less-accomplished pencilers would look too obvious, almost grotesque in its lack of subtlety. It shouldn’t work, but it absolutely does.
Dave Stewart also deserves high praise for creating the issue’s wonderful atmosphere with his dark, heavy colors. His colors accentuate Bertram’s lines and Tomasi’s words wonderfully. Each scene is colored differently, according to the mood of the moment, and even bright colors are muted or washed out. His colors, just as much as Bertram’s penciles or Tomasi’s words, creates a sense of foreboding, dread, and imminent violence.
In Summary:
House of Penance came with some high praise from both Scott Snyder and Garth Ennis. Sometimes, when you see praise like that from artists you admire, the work can’t possibly live up to the expectations they create. House of Penance stands up. It’s an engaging, atmospheric first issue that lingers long after you’ve read it, and I am looking forward to the next issue.
Grade: A+
Age Rating: N/A
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: April 13th, 2016
MSRP: $3.99