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COMIC REVIEW: FTN reviews Coffin Hill #1

October 17th, 2013 by Irwin Fletcher Comments

Writer: Caitlin Kittredge

Artist: Inaki Miranda

Publisher: Vertigo

Vertigo seems to be on a roll with the titles it has released in the past few months and their newest title is no exception.

Coffin Hill captures your senses the moment you see it on the rack. A cover with a girl, naked, surrounded by crows and blood. A cover that makes you wonder, with a name like Coffin Hill what could this title possibly be about? Well it is about witches of course and from what I can gleam from the first issue, is not all.

Coffin Hill starts off with the story of a rookie police officer Eve Coffin who has just caught the most dangerous killer in Boston since the Boston Strangler. Everyone is calling her a hero, except herself. We see that even from the get go she is stand offish with people and then not three pages in something happens to her that lands her in the emergency room covered in blood.

This is where the story shifts to ten years prior and her narrative takes over to illuminate us on the nature of the Coffins. A family that migrated from Salem and brought with them a curse, for the Coffins were a family of witches. With a lavish party happening in the Coffins Mansion we get to see Eve in her younger days and see her use of her powers as she first makes a scene at the party and then goes to meet her friends for what can only be explained as a night that could have been in the movie “The Craft”. We are not sure what happens during the night as they start a spell and the next thing we know one of the girls is gone and the other two are naked, covered in blood and surrounded by dead crows, rats and snakes.

Shifting back to the present we see Eve as she is leaving the hospital (with a now blind eye and scar) as she decides to leave Boston and return to her childhood home. The whole time telling us that sometimes when you fall so far into darkness bad things happen but you don’t die, you live.

While there are a lot of questions to be answered in this book, for a first outing it wasn’t that bad. There are some things that do not make sense from the start such as what was going on in Eve’s apartment that lead her to being in the hospital or what are the Dark Things that are discussed. This however of course is the ploy to get you to keep reading; it sucks you in and makes you want to find out the answers.

Caitlin Kittredge has a story that if done right could be a great new supernatural book; it certainly seems from this first issue that it is not going to be a Sabrina the Teenage Witch or even something along the lines of Vampire Diaries. This could be a true comic about modern witches and the demons that they invoke. I hope that is the case as it could spiral down into a cliché teen type supernatural drama, but I am optimistic that it has the makings of something good.

Inaki Miranda’s art is spectacular to say the lease and when paired with the outstanding colors of Eva De La Cruz it really is something that captures the true essence of what this book hopefully will turn out to be. Shadows, uses of grey tones and shading put you in a world of the macabre and the blood has an almost watercolor look inside the pages. It really reminds me of when you were a kid and you put too much water on the colors and some areas are bright and other dull and watery looking. Nonetheless it is still visually pleasing.

I truly hope this book does not turn into a teen drama, but I honestly do not see it going that route. It did leave me with questions that I hope that are answered but for a first issue not all that bad of a read.

So From Spin to You I give it

3.5 out of 5 nerds

 

I'm an LA journalist who really lives for his profession. I have also published work as Jane Doe in various mags and newspapers across the globe. I normally write articles that can cause trouble but now I write for FTN because Nerds are never angry, so I feel safe.