#88: Silent Hill: Past Life

Silent Hill: Past Life

Tom Waltz (story) and Menton J. Matthews III (art)
Initial release: October 2010

Comic book tie-ins are a weird breed. Like a lot of “expanded universe” material they tend to be of uneven quality and questionable canonicity, and there’s always that nagging question: “who is this for?” The Silent Hill comics are among the more pertinent examples of why we ask that question, in large part because of the nature of the franchise and what’s been done to it over the last 15 years. And yet, Silent Hill: Past Life promises something unique, being set over a full century before even the earliest game in the franchise’ timeline (Silent Hill Origins, believed to be set in the 1970s) and also ties in with Silent Hill Downpour through the character of Howard the Postman.

Set just after the American Civil War, with the infamous Toluca Prison and its conversion from POW camp to regular prison lurking in the background, a former outlaw, Jebediah, comes to Silent Hill with his gentle, godly wife Esther to get away from his violent past. But as always with Silent Hill, the past can’t be gotten away from, and amidst disturbing dreams, and people who claim to be from Jeb’s past life, something sinister is developing around his wife’s pregnancy, and the old Native American shamaness who’s taken an interest in it.

Like a lot of media featuring Native Americans there’s not a lot of respect for their culture; Inola lurks about creepily but is little more than a caricature. It’s unfortunate because the opportunity to shed a little light on the history of the town was too good to resist. That being said, the artwork is superb in that surrealist sort of way. While it’s of a piece with the hallucinatory work of Ben Templesmith (who also did art for other Silent Hill comics), Matthews’ style is a bit more immediately readable here, occasionally coming off like a series of collages. Starkly inked, monochromatic characters stand boldly before gloomy, impressionist backgrounds, and lurking just above visibility are arcane lines and magic circles, lending subtle clues and emphasis to various elements of a panel. The art goes a long way to make up for what’s otherwise a fairly pedestrian Silent Hill fanfic (official fanfic, but still fanfic) that hits on traditional Silent Hill beats (mysterious pasts, violent atonements, etc.) but does little else.

With the Civil War background it’s a uniquely American take on a series that was originally Japanese, especially given that Japanese creators don’t often consider commentaries on race when writing American settings. But this is still a work strictly for diehard fans.

-june❤

 

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