Hyde Street #1 // Review
It’s the street of the damned. It cuts through every major city. Trust me...you don’t want to end up there. You don’t want to end up like Pip “Pranky” Peabody or Mr. X. Granted...they’re both pretty successful on the street of the damned, but at least one of them would probably prefer not to be there. You’ll see both of them an a whole lot more in Hyde Street #1. Writer Geoff Johns, artist Ivan Reis and inker Danny Miki explore a delicious new avenue of horror with colorist Brad Anderson. It’s an appealing new premise that just might be inspired by bits of culture hanging out around the edges of the ads in old comic books.
Remember the X-Ray Specs? There was a guy responsible for marketing them. A guy named Freddy. He’d also tried marketing little creatures for mail order called “piranha people.” He wasn’t a nice guy, but he might have been a hell of a novelty salesman until he ended up on Hyde Street trying to get people to part with their souls. He’s doing pretty well...responsible for putting away a couple thousand deliveries. He’s nowhere near as big with the deliveries as Pranky, though. That little Boy Scout who helps people across the street only to show them hoa awful they really are? He’s made over 18,000 deliveries and he’s only getting started.
Johns works a fun premise that mixes a few different horror concepts into a single phantom street that exists in the shadowy corners of the American consciousness. It’s a fun premise that feels more or less fully formed on the page for the very firs issue of the series. Johns has done a hell of a lot of background work before diving into the dynamics of the first story. It’s a fun concept that has SO much room for development. Welcome to the comics rack Hyde Street. Here’s hoping you stick around for a while.
Reis’ work feels deeply inspired by the E.C. artwork in horror anthologies of the 1950s. There’s some beautifully dark work that’s lurking around the edges of the pages. And the visual design behind Mr. X is actually kind of stunningly iconic while also managing to be...so totally obvious. The architectural work that Reis is planting Hyde Street in feels fully realized with lots of detail animating the shadows of everything. The mid-20th century pre-Silver Age feel of the artwork does a brilliant job of bringing the feel of some forgotten horror to the rack one more time.
There was actually a guy who popularized X-ray specs and packaged Amazing Live Sea Monkeys. Harold von Braunhut was a sleazy racist who marketed some pretty shady stuff by mail order. (Crazy Crabs and the Invisible Goldfish were some of his lesser-known products.) The fictionalized Mr. X is a considerably more appealing anti-hero based on a much less appealing figure. It’s nice to see Johns and company twisting his work in a direction that explores the darker end of humanity. Very cool stuff.
Grade: A+
