Coffin Hill #6 – Review

By: Caitlin Kittredge (story), Inaki Miranda (art), Eve de la Cruz (colors)

The Story: It’s about time someone made these woods safe for witchcraft again.

The Review: In my creative writing days at undergrad, I had a professor who taught us how every character, setting, object, and detail in a story becomes part of that story’s “inventory.”  Once you create it, it remains in existence for the writer to call upon later.  It’s a great tip for getting yourself out of fictional dead ends, but it also explains the craft behind the greatest stories.  Knowing and using one’s inventory is what gives a story its cohesion and flow.

Mysteries probably rely on their inventories more than almost any other genre of fiction.  You know that thrill you get from a (good) mystery, when the solution arises from a host of seemingly inconsequential details established early on?  That’s making good use of inventory.  In contrast, Kittredge simply writes in whatever solution she needs, on the spot, to get to where she needs to go next.

Coffin Hill #5 – Review

By: Caitlin Kittredge (story), Inaki Miranda (art), Eve de la Cruz (colors)

The Story: The wicked witch strikes against the wicked stepfather.

The Review: I started reading Hinterkind and Coffin Hill at around the same time, and it’s been interesting seeing them develop on parallel lines.  With Hinterkind having recently landed on my Drop List, the big question was whether Coffin Hill would suffer the same fate.  Both share the same defect of being too comfortable in their genre conventions and both have problems settling on a consistent tone.  Given these similarities, Coffin Hill should also be Dropped.

Yet somehow, I still feel Coffin Hill deserves a little more leeway than Hinterkind did.  Kittredge definitely made things easier on herself by limiting the size of her cast and further focusing on a select few.  Even if you don’t end up liking Eve, Nate, or Mel very much, at least you have a strong sense of who they are, where they’re coming from, and what their relationships to each other are.  They’re interesting in ways that the characters of Hinterkind only aspire to be.

Coffin Hill #4 – Review

By: Caitlin Kittredge (story), Inaki Miranda (art), Eve de la Cruz (colors)

The Story: Friends are forever—and their betrayals last even longer.

The Review: Since Kittredge has, if nothing else, established that Coffin Hill is a series where tragedy prevails even in moments of triumph, it was impossible not to suspect that Mel’s miraculous recovery last issue was not as it seemed.  I put up the theory that Mel had come back deranged, the better to face once more the darkness in the woods which stole her sanity in the first place.

The truth is not quite so dramatic, being a case of simple possession.  Using a respectable bit of cop logic, Eve cuts to the chase immediately and demands to know who has invaded her friend’s body and why.  Obviously, the answers are vague and non-committal, riddled with references to “the Harvest” and so on.  Whether anything of the original Mel is left in there, though, it seems pretty foregone that whatever victory Eve manages to eke out will be pyrrhic.  Even if Eve returns Mel to normal, she’ll have placed a massive obstacle between herself and Nate, the only character she’s shown consistent real feelings for.

Coffin Hill #3 – Review

By: Caitlin Kittredge (story), Inaki Miranda (art), Eva de la Cruz (colors)

The Story: Eve takes a break from home at the insane asylum.

The Review: For a series that claims there’s an evil horror lurking within its pages, Coffin Hill hasn’t been all that scary so far—and I say this as a bona fide scaredy-cat.  I once watched the Japanese version of The Ring while I was home alone and found myself afterward incapable of proceeding down the ominously dark hall to my bedroom for the rest of the night.  I laid in the living room, watching Dharma & Greg reruns, until dawn.  I was eighteen.

Granted, it’s been some years since then (nearly ten—gah, gah!), but Coffin Hill should still have some kind of frightening effect, even if only a slight one, just to live up to the demands of its genre.  Maybe I’ve grown too experienced to get drawn in by Kittredge’s gimmicks, which rely far too heavily on overused witching motifs: rats, crows, flies, skulls, woods, children’s rhymes, etc.  These things are so common to the witch mythology that they lose a lot of their fictional power after a certain age.

Coffin Hill #2 – Review

By: Caitlin Kittredge (story), Inaki Miranda (art), Eva de la Cruz (colors)

The Story: The woods can be a magical place to be—but is that necessarily a good thing?

The Review: The debut issue of Coffin Hill introduced an interesting premise, but was altogether too vague about the specifics to really set itself out as original.  While something supernatural is obviously at work in Coffin Hill, its manifestation and its relationship to Eve Coffin and her family is rather unclear.  Until we get some specifics, it’s hard to tell if the series will be anything more than your typical tale of urban witchcraft.

This issue gets us a little closer to the details we want, though some things remain outstanding.  Mostly, we learn a little more about the Coffins’ family history, which is largely driven by powerful women, starting from Emma, the original matriarch of the American Coffins, and leading to Eve herself.  Eve also reveals a tradition of mother-daughter tensions within the Coffin legacy, as Emma herself was betrayed by her own daughter, a parallel to the spat between Eve and her mother.

Coffin Hill #1 – Review

By: Caitlin Kittredge (story), Inaki Miranda (art), Eva de la Cruz (colors)

The Story: Good rule of thumb is if something requires you to shed blood, it’s not a good idea.

The Review: A lot of the new material coming out of Vertigo so far has landed in the sci-fi camp, though with various degrees of scientific purity, from the hardcore FBP to the fantasy-injected Hinterkind.  But the supernatural is Vertigo’s bread-and-butter, and its greatest works have invariably spawned from that genre.  Coffin Hill, with its woods and witches, represents a return to that no-holds-barred magical realism which gave Vertigo its good name.

Under those terms, the debut issue plants itself firmly within that tradition, though it fails to break new ground.  The story Kittredge brings to us is very much inspired by the wannabe occultism that once peppered certain cliques of outcasts in high schools throughout the land.  Indeed, in flashbacks to Eve Coffin’s teenage years, her and her friends’ appearances are replete with punk and goth influences (clunky belts and lots of eye make-up), trivializing the kind of witchcraft involved in the series—at first.