Sisterhood: Hyde Street Story #1 // Review
Sophie and Violet have been really good friends since childhood. A very close friendship became all the more intense when they both find themselves present for the tragic death of Sophie’s mom. Long-term friendship goes through many, many twists and turns, however. Things can get pretty horrifying as Sophie is about to find out...on Hyde Street. Writer Maytal Zchut and artist Leila Leiz open-up a whole new end of the horror on Hyde Street with the compelling first issue of Sisterhood--a whole new Hyde Street mini-series. Color comes to the page courtesy of Alex Sinclair.
Sophie and Violet are so close that they both end up attending the exact same college. They’re roommates and everything. Things begin to drift apart, though. Sophie is deep in her studies. Violet is pledging with a prestigious sorority. They’re drifting apart. It looks like Ivy is all set to finally become a full-fledged sorority sister at a party that she’s invited Sophie to...but Sophie DOES have a psych paper to finish, so Violet is going to have to go alone. The next morning, Violet isn’t in her bed. There’s no answer on her phone...it goes straight to voicemail. Then she gets a call from Violet’s mom with the bad news...
Zchut takes the classic trappings of YA horror and twists them around the specific format of a Hyde Street story. There’s quite a lot going on in the substance of the first issue that suggests much darker things around the edges of the plot that may go far deeper than traditional YA horror, though. There’s drama. There’s tragedy. There’s passion. It’s all more than enough to keep everything moving as the plot works its wayt through the end of the first issue with more than a few dramatic and thematic echoes suggesting something deeper beneath it all.
Leiz etches the passion into the page with some pretty sharp moments of energy. The moodiness of the story makes its way to the page under the power of Sinclair’s colors. There’s a particularly dramatic split between the fifth and the sixth pages. A rainy funeral for Sophie’s mom on the fifth page flips over to a bright and sunny day at college years later on the sixth page. There are quite a few moments of clever visual framing that elevate the story beyond casual trappings of traditional YA horror.
The Hyde Street end of the Ghost Machine continues to show a great deal of promise. It’s very, very difficult to build a whole horror universe that is exclusively horror but Ghost Machine has done a pretty good job as it continues to explore Hyde Street. The whole thing really feels like it could become a major property that could edge its way into a whole bunch of different platforms if all goes well. The editors at Ghost Machine have found a format that seems to work quite well as the property expands into multiple different titles.
