Sisterhood: A Hyde Street Story #3 // Review
There’s a police officer who is asking Sophie a few questions. She’s not exactly in any frame of mind to be able to answer them. She wsa just there when someone died. She was there. She was talking to her. She looked back adn she was gone. All of this was happening on a balcony. The student in question had fallen off the balcony. One death is the least of Sophie’s worries in Sisterhood: A Hyde Street Story #3. Writer Maytal Zchut uhers Sophie and the ghost of her dead friend through another issue with artist Leila Leiz and colorist Alex Sinclair.
Sophie isn’t all that certain that she wasn’t responsible for the death in question. Maybe it was the ghost of her dead friend Violet. The ghost waants revenge against the sorority that might have ben responsible for her death and she might not be above using Sophie to enact that revenge. After all...she’s only visible in reflection...only s tangible as an echoed memory. And maybe there’s something about the fact that Sophie keeps blacking out. maybe there’s something about the fact that Violet seems a bit TOO driven to get the kind of revenge that involves death.
Zchut slowly lowers-in the full reality of the horror that he’s been developing over the ourse of hte past couple of issues. The beautiful thing about this is the fact that there aren’t any REAL surprises here. No sudden semantic jump scares or anything like that. All of the plot developments in this isue have been slowly and subtly foreshadowed over the course of the series thus far. The slow and steady development of the plot has been cleverly rendred throughout the run of the series. It’s been a great deal of fun so far.
Leiz crafts a well-balanced rendering of horror drama. There’s a stark simplicity in the faces of everyone involved that really amplifies the more obvious end of human terror without over-exaggerating it. The supernatural end of things could be finessed a bit more. Violet is seen in reflections...it might be a bit more of a visually haunting presentation if Sinclair could work with the color effects to give Violet a bit more of a supernatural glow. As it is, Violet’s reality isn’t as eerily defined as it could be. She’s still quite vivid on the page even without any added supernatral collor effects, but her visual. reality feels a bit too earthbound without some thing there to make her look more nebulous and spectral.
There’s still quite a bit of story to be told with another couple of issues to go in the series. The series has come quite a ways in the length of the first three issues. As satisfying as the series has been thus far, it could seriously get derailed into something very, very silly given the plot developments that have come to pass in the course of the third issue. Zchut has been remarkably good with things thus far. It’s difficult to imagine quite where things might be going from here. In a way, it really feels like the rthird issue is a pretty solid ending in its own right even if not everything is resolved by issue’s end.
