The Dollhouse Family #1 // Review
Earlier this year, DC Comics shuttered their Vertigo imprint, ending a decades-old tradition of weird comics aimed at adults. It’s a baffling decision, particularly given their recent launches of both the Sandman Universe imprint and the new Hill House Comics imprint, both of which are producing comics that are essentially Vertigo comics, just after the end of Vertigo. The new Hill House comic, The Dollhouse Family, certainly feels like it would have been at home in the heyday of 1990s Vertigo.
That’s not necessarily a good thing, as The Dollhouse Family #1 seems to be trying just a little too hard to emulate those mid-1990s Vertigo comics. The story follows a family in England in the late 1970s and early 1980s—abusive husband, put-upon mother, troubled daughter—as they are mysteriously bequeathed, an obviously haunted dollhouse. Running parallel to this is the story of a surveyor in 1826 who discovers a mysterious giant and an even more mysterious normal-sized person in a cave. It’s all very 1980s/1990s DC Comics British Invasion, without really saying anything new.
Writer M.R. Carey does a good job building the twee-yet-creepy atmosphere that was the hallmark of early Vertigo. The writing doesn’t do nearly as strong work making the reader care about these characters or differentiating them from countless other stories.
The art by Peter Gross and Vince Locke is fine. Their scratch style is perfectly suited to this type of story, and their character design is solid. The colors by Chris Peter are flat and understated, exactly like—you guessed it—1990s Vertigo. Even the lettering by Todd Klein recalls that period in comics.
The Dollhouse Family really is a love letter to a very specific period in comics. What it lacks, unfortunately, is the innovation and unpredictability that really characterized the heyday of Vertigo comics.
