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.

Grandmothers also loom large in this story, mostly as mediators between their daughters and granddaughters.  Last issue, Eve mused she’d never have ended up in the trouble she did if her grandmother had stuck around, and here we see another young woman who ends up lost in the woods after her own grandmother passed away.  At the same time, it’s the grandmothers who appear to have exposed their grandkids to the powers which led them down that dark path.  It’ll be interesting to see how Kittredge develops on these familial relationships over time.

Other than that, the nature of the occult and how it plays into the Coffin story is still rather obscure.  Despite clear signs of Eve doing and seeing things that are distinctly other, we still don’t understand the source and fuel of this strangeness.  At best, we can conclude that this is a story about a woman forced to face the use of her dark abilities against the even darker forces lurking in the woods around her home.  But is this an internal or external conflict?  Do higher powers truly compel her to sink into black magic, or is she being tempted by her own desires?

It’d be nice, too, to get some clarity in where Eve stands with Nate, the only remaining witness to her destructive past.  This is due in part to Kittredge’s erratic time jumps, but there’s a lot of mixed signals as to what kind of relationship they had as teens.  Even though Nate is, at this point, officially Mel’s boyfriend, he doesn’t seem to have any compunction making out with Eve in a clearly invested way.  It could very well be, too, that this love triangle is just complicated.  At one point, Mel yells back at Eve, “Whatever you’re doing to him, leave me the good parts!  He’s not much of a boyfriend if you break him!”  After the incident where mutual friend Dani was lost to the “dark things” in the wood, Nate and Eve clearly had a falling out, but there’s got to be more than coincidence driving both to police work (especially considering their less than pristine youths).

Miranda’s art is pretty, if emotionally flat; most of the characters refuse to alter the symmetrical perfection of their faces for any reason, even when the scene calls for a strong reaction.  Where Miranda truly excels is in his depiction of supernatural effects.  The panel of Eve, perched on Nate’s car, a flood of raven/crow feathers dispersing ex nihilo from her body, is stuff worthy of witchcraft cinema, dynamic and chilling.  De La Cruz’s colors are fine, but a little extreme in her efforts to convey New England gloom.  During the cloudiest scenes, Eve and Nate’s skin tones become so pale, gray, and waxy as to appear like macabre make-up rather than actual skin.

Conclusion: Kittredge has got a solid foundation for future stories here, but there’s a lot more work to be done to convince you those stories are coming down the pike.

Grade: B-

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: – You know your friendship is tight when you can call each other “bitch” and “jealous whore” and let it roll right off your backs.