‘Coffin Hill’ Buried Under Cliches

REVIEW: Coffin Hill #1

Story by Caitlin Kittredge

Art by Inaki Miranda; Colors by Eva De La Cruz

Publisher: DC Comics under the Vertigo imprint

Review by Gene Selassie

On the surface, Coffin Hill played to all of my sensibilities; strong female protagonist, dark artwork that is just stylized enough to make it stand out, genre mash of crime, thriller, and horror. I was sure that this book was tailor made for me. But we all know what happens when one assumes…

Writer Caitlin Kittredge had a really good setup with Officer Eve Coffin, who is barely on the job a few weeks and makes a huge collar, taking down the worst killer since the Boston Strangler. But an off-duty altercation later leads to a life-changing incident, and from here we get a glimpse of her past. This is where the narrative nearly goes off the rails. There are certain tropes that have become so ingrained into movies and literature about witchcraft that I wish that entire playbook would just be thrown out. It’s about as tired as Ric Flair going to the top rope and leading us to believe it won’t backfire as he’s thrown off of there for the billionth time. I’ll avoid direct spoilers, but if you’ve seen The Craft, The Covenant or roughly 80 percent of any witch movie from the past twenty-five years, then you’ve seen these story elements hundreds of times already.

To compound the problem, there wasn’t a single likable character in the entire story. The present-day characters were all bland and the flashback characters were all unlikable. The pacing also proved to be a chore. I believe the story would have moved much more smoothly had the flashbacks been interspersed throughout the story instead of all in one chunk.

The artwork was solid, if not mind blowing. Inaki Miranda’s line work was solid and panel layouts were spot on. The only major flaw was the character acting. Each character only had one of two different facial expressions, making plot reveals or characterization fall a bit flat. Eva De La Cruz’ colors were spot on. Honestly, she did a lot of heavy lifting, from the grime of the local police bar, to the cold and eerie forests; De La Cruz really was the unsung hero of this team.

The ending didn’t so much tie up the two disparate threads so much as swept them up together in a dust pan so we can get to the last page, which in hindsight makes this feel less like an issue one and more like a zero issue.

I’m going to keep reading this book as it seems to have interesting ideas and a strong lead and easy to follow layouts. Now that the requisite moving the chess pieces has been done, I hope that Kittredge will be firing on all cylinders and that she really utilizes this type of genre mash to its fullest potential in future issues.- 3 out of 5.

Gene Selassie is a screenwriter/filmmaker who has worked in many genres across numerous media. He wrote and directed the short film “Amaranthine,” which has been submitted to Fantastic Fest and Austin Film Festival, and worked on an adventure film screenplay for JP Saladin and on a heist screenplay for Jake West, along with several other screenplays and television pilots in live action and animation. Currently he is working on his second graphic novel, a political thriller called Uprising. His first one was a crime thriller called Rock Paper Scissors. Also, he has written several short stories and is working on his first novel, a Young Adult fantasy/drama. See more of his work at http://geneselassie.blog.com/