Craig's review - 27 march 2008
He has carved his niche in the short fiction world, produced a first novel with the mature quality of many horror greats, and now created a comic book series. Writer Joe Hill has teamed with artist Gabriel Rodriguez for ‘Locke & Key' (IDW Publishing), and provides another solid entry into horror's illustrated ‘novels'.
I'll begin by saying it was genuinely fun to source ‘Locke & Key – Issue One' and read it for review. I have not read a comic book for quite some time, with the exception of '30 Days of Night', also published by IDW, but since this was created by Joe Hill, I had no choice – I was drawn by his prior writing alone. But please, my recent inexperience does not mean I have no merit in reviewing a comic – in my adolescent years (and slightly beyond) I was an avid collector, moving from greats such as Spider-Man and Batman to more mature entries such as Spawn/Violator/Angel, Sabretooth, Sandman (how many started with ‘S' back in the day?), and so on, and on. In fact, after reading ‘Locke & Key', I dug through my trove of old comics and re-read a few first issues for comparison. Though I have a penchant for some of the classics, Hill's creation has largely made a great start. I'll tell you why.
Issue One of ‘Locke & Key' takes a big gamble. It is essentially an introduction to the characters who will captivate us for future issues (I have seen Hill mention there are ideas for at least thirty-two, though there will be six in the first run and a rumoured total of eighteen). Yes, I know that's what a first issue typically does, but I'll explain the subtle difference later.
First, let's look at the characters themselves. From the title, we have the Locke family. There are three siblings: big, reserved, the-world-is-against-me Tyler (the focal character in this issue, in that the plot chiefly revolves around his memories), grunge-sister Kinsey, and hyperactive explorer Bode, the youngest. There is also their widowed mother, who I initially thought was killed (though her spared life will probably be a spring-board for pain and revenge in later issues). To build the characters, Hill uses a series of flashbacks to the time when Tyler's father was brutally murdered by Sam Lesser and Al Grubb (they know Tyler through school, and Mr Locke was their guidance counsellor). This is essentially what the first issue is about – showing the traumatic experience the family endures which has them move to Keyhouse (Lovecraft, Massachusetts) to live with their Uncle Duncan.
Here is the subtle difference between other comics' first issues – because this experience takes up roughly twenty-six pages. It is only in the last few pages that we are shown a surviving (somehow!) Sam Lesser, locked in a Juvenile Detention Centre for killing the father. But Sam's few frames speak handfuls, since he is insanely talking to a projection in the toilet water, leaving his ties to the Locke family and Keyhouse wide open. Then, in the final four pages, we are finally given a brief glimpse of what this comic series is actually about. I won't spoil it for you, but the supernatural element was enough to raise my interest for the second issue. Though other comics do follow the same formula (with many introducing their ‘bad guy' at the end), for me, ‘Locke & Key' read more like a novel (indeed, it is finished with ‘Welcome to Lovecraft: Chapter One'), though don't be mistaken that that's a bad thing – it just felt different.
The only criticism I'm leaning towards is that the issue didn't reveal enough of what the series is truly about, as revealed by Hill in numerous interviews:
"JOE HILL: Locke & Key is a supernatural thriller about three kids who find themselves the custodians of an unlikely New England mansion called Keyhouse. Within the house are secret doors with transformative powers, the power to fundamentally change a person's identity. There's one door, when a kid steps through it he's turned into an old person. Pass through another door, and a boy will turn into a girl, while a girl will be turned into a boy. There's another door that unlocks a closet, filled with robes: an African robe, an Asian robe. By putting the robe on, you change your race. And they find themselves pitted against a thing that calls itself Dodge, who preys on children with a weak sense of self. Dodge has a habit of turning them lethally dangerous: into Columbine style-killers, or lynch mobs. There's a terrible door within Keyhouse that Dodge would like to force open, and which my heroes have to keep shut at all costs. Ultimately it's a kind of modern Grimm's fairy tale, about the way young people discover and construct their own identity."
(http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=122865 )
If you had me guess that at the end of Issue One, I don't think I could have.
Now, plot aside, I must say that this is Joe Hill and artist Gabriel Rodriguez's creation. Though Hill has obviously come up with the concept, story, etc, Rodriguez has added the comic book dimension that weaves passages of hidden text into illustrations, with a neat layout and pleasant crispness of character design that seems to be lacking in many comics today (I said I haven't read any lately, but I always find time for the occasional skim!). Let me just get this off my chest (you can hate me, it's okay) by comparing such design to IDW's marketing masterpiece, '30 Days of Night'. This comic had a brilliant idea (perhaps not fully realised), and I loved the illustrations because they were so experimental and, well, different, and Ben Templesmith is from Perth (like me), but man did some images frustrate me! I looked at them for half an hour and still had no idea what was going on, which ruined part of the experience because it was such a minimalist graphic novel in terms of text – people got what they wanted out of it, because you had to fill in the blanks.
Yes, I have a point – I'm cycling back to ‘Locke & Key'. Because in this comic book there is a fine line between it being minimalist and intricate in its story. While Hill builds the plot, Rodriguez adds so many wonderful images that deepen the story. Like a full-page shot of Tyler Locke standing over his father's urn (after a shot of the father walking in to their house, confronted by an axe and gun). We feel Tyler's pain, and that of the family on pews behind, and cringe with the knowledge that the father was mutilated so badly in the attack that his body couldn't have been displayed. Likewise, during a flashback of the attack, we don't need to be told what has happened to the mother because there is a shot of Al Grubb zipping up his pants, a single woman's shoe on the bed, hand-print blood streaks on the walls of the room he's exiting...
This connection between story and images should be what makes this comic book a hit.
I think this series will sell well on creative name brand alone, but I must say that it is deserving of your time, even for someone like me who needed to dust-off his experience with the illustrated extraordinary.
HOT-OFF-THE-PRESS NOTE: Well, just as I was about to post this I checked IDW's website and it seems Dimension Films has just bought the film and television rights to Locke and Key. So it seems the series will be around for some time yet! Well done, Mr Hill.
