Luke Owen reviews Hide #1 from El MacFearsome Comic Squares…
After a typical happy day with his typical happy family, a young boy named Kevin wakes up to a world where everyone over the age of 18 wants to kill everyone UNDER the age of 18.
With the tongue-in-cheek opening line of “this actually happened”, it’s quite clear that Vernon Smith’s Hide is not taking itself too seriously. Despite its dark storyline, Hide feels surprisingly light due to its bright and colourful artwork and purposefully forced dialogue. It’s not unbalanced per say, but it really should decide whether it’s one or the other.
That’s not to say that Hide is a fluffy read – far from it. Working like a reverse Children of the Corn, Hide #1 posits a world in which adults turn overnight into sadistic killers who hunt those under the age of 18. It opens with almost a parody of the “perfect suburban family” as they celebrate the fifth birthday of their little girl before jumping right into the action of the plot. This opening scene again furthers the idea that Hide shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but then Smith pulls out an image of a blood-soaked mother holding her dead five-year old daughter with a knife in her hand.
Juxtaposition used to its fullest.
From here the rest of the 22-page comic whizzes by as young Kevin fights his parents to evade their murderous attempts before discovering that the rest of his neighbourhood has also come under this mysterious spell. As an opening gambit to hook in a reader, Vernon Smith does an excellent job by focusing on the terror that the plot puts forward rather than spending the first half of the comic establishing character. While this could be seen as a negative on Smith’s writing, it’s more likely that ‘character’ is a term that will come further down the line.
Doing the writing, artwork, colouring and lettering is a huge task to take on by any comic book writer, but Smith carries his own in this first issue. It’s a simple style of artwork for the majority, but his more violent images (i.e. children being killed) are very powerful and carry a huge impact. However, this is where the comic’s unbalance comes into play – it’s like having a huge murderous rampage in the middle of Archie and Riverdale. It’s hard to settle into the comic as you’re not sure if you should be shocked at the images or laughing at the style.
Perhaps it was the intention of Smith to create such an odd dynamic of light and dark, but it doesn’t quite work. It’s not hard hitting enough to be gritty but it’s not funny enough for it to be 100% tongue in cheek. With that said, Hide #1 carries a good amount of intrigue and its simple story could end up being a superb read. Balancing issues aside, this is quite a good first issue.
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Originally published January 8, 2014. Updated November 7, 2019.
