Hellverine #4: One Story Ends, Another Begins

Trauma, regret, and the desire to make amends and balance the scales factor heavily into Hellverine’s main character. Under Percy’s pen, Akihiro is a complicated character that grows more complex the longer the series continues. With its focus on Akihiro’s troubled relationship with his parents, Hellverine #4 should be a particularly strong issue. Unfortunately multiple stumbles keep it from landing with significant impact.

Akihiro, the Hellverine, faces a demonic reincarnation of his mother in Hellverine #4. She has enthralled the nearby town’s children and now she sends them all at Akihiro in one large attack. But this battle with his “mother” is only a prologue to a greater struggle at the site of one of his worst fights with his father, Wolverine.

Hellverine #4’s construction is unusual in that it quickly resolves the story begun in the previous issue before moving on to what feels like a completely different story in this issue’s second half. There is a thematic connection in that the issue’s two halves allow Percy to dive into Akihiro’s interaction with his parents as well as consequences of those interactions. But as a story within a single issue, the shift is abrupt. The pacing is also uneven as the issue moves from the climax and resolution of one story to the beginning and rising action of another.

Regular Hellverine readers are less likely to be bothered by this. Percy writes Hellverine more as an ongoing Akihiro character study than a series with a strictly linear story progression. Hellverine #4’s focus on theme over plot is a perfect example. As Hellverine, Akihiro is able to literally burn away some of the trauma from his past when he faces down the demonic version of his mother. Moments like this are a bit on the nose, occasionally turning the Hellverine into a walking metaphor. But at the same time, they help maintain Hellverine as a character oriented series where a given issue’s plot is relaxed and in some ways secondary.

In typical fashion for the series, Hellverine #4 is extremely light on dialogue with the vast majority of text devoted to Akihiro’s internal monologue. This is key to making the issue’s transition from the first story to the second work. Akihiro effectively and efficiently walks the reader from one to the other, explaining what the connection is. But more than hand holding the reader through the story, what Percy writes for Akihiro gets deep into the character’s head in a way that dialogue exchanges are unlikely to. Percy doesn’t write any kind of self-deception into Akihiro’s thoughts. Putting the character’s emotions and motivations on display like this continues to make this series’ narrative a major success.

Ienco generally skimps on backgrounds. Larger panels will sometimes establish a setting, such as when Akihiro arrives in Gigosha’s seedy underbelly. But as soon as any action breaks out, detailed settings are generally lost in favor of putting characters against empty colored backgrounds. There are instances where this makes the fight sequence feel detached from the scene surrounding it, as though the action is itself ephemeral. But the opposite is also true at times as choice assures that characters are the only point of interest within a panel. There are instances of both effects here. The panels featuring this technique during the early fight between Hellverine and Akihiro’s “mother” successfully emphasize the emotion of the conflict. A later fight sequence in Gigosha is less effective as the series of panels featuring this style come across as more of an interruption to the ongoing scene than compelling action.

Character centric art is considerably more detailed. Close-up views of characters see liberal linework and shading, accentuating facial features and helping to communicate a general age range. Mouth and eye shape, worry lines on foreheads, brown angles–all of these things emphasize character emotion. Variations on Akihiro’s expressions are minimal. Ienco draws him as someone who doesn’t betray his feelings which serves as a fine counterpoint to his blunt and emotional inner monologue as written by Percy.

Valenza’s color choices are more nuanced in Hellverine #4’s second half when Akihiro visits Gigosha. Browns and blue grays emphasize the disrepair of the slum-like area he’s exploring.

During action sequences when Ienco sets characters against empty space, Valenza is largely successful at choosing background colors that create effective contrast with the characters set against them. An exception is during the fight between Hellverine and Akihiro’s demonic “mother” where Hellverine’s flames get somewhat lost against a peach background.

Several sequence in Hellverine #4 are text heavy with Akihiro’s internal monologue, and a number of these involve smaller panels that contain more than one caption box. In most cases Lanham is able to keep the caption boxes out of the way of Ienco’s art, but unfortunately there are several instances where the captions are intrusive.