Hammerfist #1: Dark and Moody

Hammerfist #1 starts out as nothing more than a dark criminal-centric story. Mike is a kind of working class contract killer, making enough money to live on and also afford a meth habit. The story transforms considerably in the final third of the issue, going in an unexpected supernatural direction.

Mike is a difficult character to invest in. He is not a glamorous contract killer or a criminal with deep moral complexity. Mike isn’t remotely sympathetic, but he does have considerable depth. The first half of Hammerfist #1 advances primarily via Mike’s internal monologue. Rick Remender’s writing here is exceptional. Most importantly, Mike is a very self-aware character. The brutal honesty in the internal monologue makes Mike easier to connect with despite him not being sympathetic.

All of Hammerfist #1’s characters have a rugged quality. A lot of this comes through in facial features. Steve Epting delivers good detail without going overboard on linework. That detail feels strategic–accentuating forehead lines, cheekbones, wrinkles around the eyes. Different combinations of these along with different lengths and thicknesses on the lines make it feel like these characters have been around the block a few times while still keeping them visually distinct. This kind of detail extends even to the female characters who, even when they have rough edges in stories like this, frequently lack such facial linework in favor of preserving a sense of beauty. This choice is a welcome one as it maintains the overall feel of the world these characters inhabit.

Epting also makes the world these characters inhabit particularly moody with generous shading. Characters’ faces are often partially obscured by shading that is reacting to implied light sources. This is also the case with clothing, settings, and so forth. All of these objects have weight to them, and like the characters themselves, the world feels lived in.

Matt Hollingsworth’s coloring style for Hammerfist #1 isn’t faded but it is soft. The day time sequences border on having a washed out quality. This general style plays well into the story’s darker mood. The softer colors work with Epting’s use of dark shading, especially when it comes to the characters themselves. Neither the colors nor the shading jump out too much. Rather it all blends together to create very balanced images. There is also just enough color contrast to keep the different elements distinct rather than blending all together which can sometimes happen with less vivid coloring.

Mike’s internal monologue narration is broken up into a lot of caption boxes. In many cases, a box may only have a sentence, sometimes as short as three words. Rus Wooton does an excellent job of not just keeping all of these boxes out of the way of Epting’s strong art, but also organizing them in such a way that the reader’s eye can track them down or across a panel, encouraging the reader to take in everything on the page.