Review: The Silent Hill Graphic Novels

Whether you like the psychological horror genre or not, there is no doubt that the Silent Hill games are the best of the best and sets the bar for anything related. With the great success of the games came the movie which was also extraordinarily brilliant in capturing the theme of Silent Hill. Usually, movies from computer games suck total ass, but the movie was near perfect. Why? Because the film creators stuck closely to the source material. Let me repeat that again, the creators stuck closely to the source material.

I love Silent Hill, and when I found out that the entire graphic novel series was on bittorrent (I ain't no chump), I was excited. I had heard great things about the comic books, especially that they were hard to obtain due to being completely sold out even before they were finished printing the actual paper. Being the true fan of Silent Hill, I abstained from reading any spoilers or trying to know anything about the comic before actually reading it. Big mistake.

I could write a book on how bad this comic actually is, but I'll just talk about the worst parts of this gigantic train wreck.

First of all, the name "Silent Hill" is perfect. It's not overly scary sounding, and only slightly creepy. This does two things. First, it initially gives the impression that the town of Silent Hill is some quiet, peaceful place, which sets up the irony that it's actually a hell-infested perversion of your innermost fears. Second, it keeps out the goth kiddies whose favorite movies are The Grudge and the Grudge 2. So what's the title of the comic book?


Yeah, that's right. Dying Inside. When I first saw this, through my sinking dismay, I tried to have a positive attitude. "Ok," I thought, "the title is totally lame, but it's the first of it's kind and everyone makes mistakes." Which is true, I mean, look at any great comic book and the first issues look like total shit. So I browsed the other titles in the series:




Keep in mind these didn't all come out at the same time, so there is no excuse for this shit. I mean, "Dead/Alive"? Seriously, could they get more obvious? It's misleading because the reader thinks that there are two options, when there is only one: "suck". Could they possibly be more uncreative? "Among The Damned"? Are they in hell or something, I can't tell. "The Grinning Man?" Could that be the Grim Reaper? It's as if the writers bought these titles 10 for $10 at a Halloween discount store.

Then there is the artwork. In evaluating comics, I place artwork on equal importance as plot. Now, I'm not some art elitist and demand that everything be drawn realistically, but for fucks sake, it has to include some effort, and it has to make sense. Everything in the Silent Hill comic is drawn very sketchy and with high contrast colors. I assume that this is to blur the lines between fantasy and reality and give a very depressing atmosphere. Sure, that's fine for a couple of pages, but every single page is like this. It's not artistic, it's retarded. For example:

I mean, I think something important happened here, and I'd really like to know what. I think the Grey Smudges Of Death and the Indescribable Shades of Black got our main character, Lauryn (with a "y" because anything else conforms to the mainstream and that's not hip enough). "Ugh!" she says. "Ugh! You paid $3.99 for something looks a shitswirl on the side of a toilet bowl. The expression of the two guys in the last panel is priceless. It's almost as if the artist knows how incomprehensible the first panel is, but "Fuck it, just a couple more issues of this crap and I can move up to drawing covers for game-inspired novels like the critically acclaimed Starcraft Novels. Greatness here I come."

Ok, the style sucks and is totally different than the game and the movie which relied on it's realism for psychological terror, but whatever. At least the drawings are alright, especially the faces:

Actually, just forget it.

Let's move on to the plot. The plot is terrible. I could say more, but even I don't understand the plot due to the sheer amount of bad artwork and horrible dialog. In short, it's something about a psychiatrist who takes his patient to Silent Hill in order to cure her nightmares of the place, and blah blah blah. Rather than describe it, I'll let the pages do it for me:


I am....

....surrounded....

....by cliches.....


So we got some kind of tentacle monsters. That's funny, because I don't remember anything like that in the game. Then we got the standard scary little girl, but she's not scary because throughout all five god awful issues, she has the witty rebellious sarcasm of a teenager, which gets old in 0.5 milliseconds. In the issue, they run around Silent Hill, and all the monsters which made the games so great never appear. Instead we get goblins and demons again which are straight out of a Halloween discount store. Next issue is great:


A bunch of teenagers from Hot Topic find a video of Silent Hill and decide to go there to shoot a movie and make some money. This is just perfect because this idea has never been done before, and I think will start a new genre. I call it, the teen slasher flick. This crap continues for four illegible issues where they fight monsters that again, have never appeared in any Silent Hill game. At the end they all die, or they live, whatever it doesn't matter. In fact, all the other plots aren't even worth mentioning, it's just a total shit fest.

And what else sucks about this comic is the-

[AIR RAID SIREN]

Oh shit! An air raid siren, that can only mean-

PYRAMID HEAD, HELL YEAH

Finally, in the very last issue, there is one panel of multiple Pyramid Heads with the middle Pyramid Head holding not one, but TWO Great Knives. If there is any redeeming factor of this garbage comic, this is it. The writers finally decided in between smokes of a crack pipe and contemplating suicide that "Hey, maybe we should include a monster that is actually part of Silent Hill!". What an idea. Unfortunetly, this is as much Pyramid Head that we get. Along with two dog monsters that also never appeared in the game.

So just who are these writers that managed to negatively contribute to the greatness of Silent Hill? Take a wild guess in this picture of the two writers with the original designers of Silent Hill:

This is like one of those children's picture puzzles: Who does not belong?

But wait, I've seen that face before!


It all makes sense now. The shitty art, the poor plot. It's not fiction, IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED. ITS ALL REAL. The demon of Silent Hill has taken real form and is trying to invade our world, one shitty comic at a time.

At the bottom of that picture is this message:



No, you didn't. Fuck off, Kris Oprisko and Ted Adams.

I'd like to end this review with a video of the best scenes from the remake of The Wicker Man, which adequately conveys my feelings about this comic: