Hinterkind vol. 1: The Waking World

Some people have theorized that DC has conditioned readers to buy the bargain-priced trade paperbacks for Vertigo titles rather than the monthly issues, and this is why the imprint has had such a hard time launching new series over the past few years.  I can see the logic in that line of thinking, yet it doesn’t account for the success of “American Vampire” as that title’s collections go hardcover-first and the failure of most new Vertigo titles to generate any kind of buzz on their arrival.  (As for me personally, I’ve been waiting for Vertigo trades since before they thought to put numbers on the spines of “Preacher,” “Transmetropolitan,” and “Sandman.”  No training here, just deeply ingrained behavior.)  While strong trade paperback sales have helped sustain a handful of titles through their runs — “DMZ,” “Scalped,” and “The Unwritten” to name the most prominent — the fact is that most of these new series aren’t good enough to generate the excitement and seize the collective consciousness of the comics-reading audience the way the imprint’s most famous titles have.  That’s the kind of fate that “Hinterkind” is facing right now, which is a shame.  It won’t change your life, but I found it to be a pretty decent read.

Now there are lots of series set in a post-apocalyptic environment.  There are also those that involve the fantastic creatures of myth appearing in the real world.  It’s very rare to see them combined here in “Hinterkind” as an event called the Blight killed off most of humanity and left their creations to be reclaimed by nature.  With the majority of humans gone, cyclops, faeries, satyrs, and the sidhe started crawling out of the woodwork to reclaim what was theirs long ago.

The series itself starts out on the island of Manhattan where a group of humans are living together peacefully in a village.  At least, they are until they’re unable to contact their neighbors and their doctor, the genial Jeff Bridges-esque Asa, gets permission to take a group to find out what’s up.  Once his granddaughter Prosper hears about this, she asks to come along but is predictably shot down.  Though you’d fully expect her to sneak along after Asa’s group, she winds up facing an even bigger issue:  Her best friend Angus has grown a tail.  Rather than wait for the villagers to kick him out because of whatever he’s become, the youth has decided to lead of his own volition.  Prosper partners up with him and the two head out to find what the wilderness holds.

That’s not even all of the first issue, and if you think that this series is going to be a case of exploring this world through competing road trips then you’d better think again.  Writer Ian Edginton managed to successfully wrongfoot my expectations as to where the story was going on more than one occasion in this volume.  Even though there are all sorts of mythological creatures out there who view humans as a delicacy, it turns out that man has a few surprises left in store from the old world for everyone.  It’s thanks to the emergence of this new faction that I couldn’t successfully predict where the book was going once I got halfway in.  By the end of the volume, things are still in a state of flux but the narrative has enough focus and a sense of purpose to keep me interested in what’s going to happen next.

This is good because as unpredictable as the story can be, its cast and scripting are pretty standard issue.  Propser, Angus and Asa are all cut from familiar archetypal cloth, as are other characters like the quasi-untrustworthy human hunter Jon Hobb.  Credit where credit is due, the conflict between the sidhe mother and daughter may be overly familiar at first but it reaches a boiling point much faster than I thought, and in a way I didn’t see coming.  Again, that speaks more towards Edginton’s skill with the plotting than his actual scripting.  Every clever bit like Asa’s “guilted out by a professional,” or the goofiness involving the monsters and fairy tracking the doctor’s crew is equaled by the familiar platitudes coming from the rest of the cast.  Granted, none of this is actually bad.  It’s just that a good portion of the dialogue is more dull in its functionality than anything else.

I had not heard of Francesco Trifogli, the artist of “Hinterkind,” before seeing his work here.  For what it’s worth, he provides decent work that delivers what I like to see from Vertigo titles.  That would be art that’s expressive enough to show the characters’ emotions clearly, and to tell the story with no confusion.  Trifogli hits those marks pretty well, and I like his creature designs too.  He’d fit right in on the likes of “B.P.R.D.”  Even if he’s not all that big on detail or spectacle, what the artist provides on the page serves the story quite well.

So the virtues of “Hinterkind” are more modest than eye-catching and I can imagine that’s why it hasn’t set the sales charts on fire.  In fact, I’m not optimistic that it’ll enjoy a nice long sixty-plus issue run that the most popular Vertigo titles have enjoyed.  That is, unless they sell some ten-thousand copies of this volume.  I’m sure they’d let it run as long as Edginton and Trifogli wanted if that happened.  It probably won’t, but that won’t stop me from buying future volumes of this title when it comes out.  I liked the story that it tells here and am looking forward to seeing what comes next.