I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got 2 new comics plus a hard cover collection:
And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.
Here is a book I found on the shelves of my local comic shop as I was trying to find something to buy on a slow week. I had never heard of the writer, Robert Tinnell, before but the artist’s name, Bo Hampton, was familiar but I haven’t seen his name on a comic in quite a while. I flipped through it, it looked intriguing, and I bought it.
“Sight Unseen” is about ghosts. Specifically it is about a blind scientist who works in the field of optics and created a pair of glasses that allow him to see ghosts. Along with his assistant they are collecting data on the glasses and ghosts so they can present them in a paper to the defense department. These guys are not TV style ghost hunters but real scientists involved in real science. Needless to say things don’t stay neat and scientific as murder, mystery, and real scary ghosts enter the picture.
The art was moody and atmospheric but sometimes looked sloppy. Some of the computer effects that were used in the coloring looked cheesy and didn’t work well. Overall I liked the artwork but I question some of the artist’s decisions.
Oh, and the lettering is horrible. Randy would be repulsed by it.
The writing is quite good. We get a bunch of interesting characters besides the two scientists and an interesting plot. I’ve seen and read a bunch of ghost stories but this one made the genre its own. It wasn’t the same old straight forward haunting story or the you can see it coming a mile away twist ending ghost story.
The style the whole book was done in was kind of unusual. They seemed to be going for that quick image Japanese horror movie style that came on the scene a few years ago with “The Grudge”, “The Ring”, and “The Eye”. I didn’t think that type of style could be adapted very well to a comic but it was mostly successful. It didn’t alway work as some of the bad effects I mentioned before came as part of the attempt to make this style work. Nice try though.
If you like your comics straight forward and traditional then look somewhere else. But if you, like me, enjoy searching out the new an experimental check out this book and see if it floats your boat. I liked it.
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