Comic Review: Vinyl #1

Vinyl #1

Image Comics

Writer: Doug Wagner

Art: Daniel Hillyard

Colors: Dave Stewart

Letters: Ed Dukeshire

A friendship between a bloody serial killer with a vinyl fixation and the FBI agent charged with capturing him isn’t exactly expected. However, it was this unexpected pair that caught my attention for this week’s review: Image Comics‘s new title Vinyl.

The first issue starts off two days from the story’s present and displays to the readers a cumbersome situation. Some sort of zombie is about to hack the FBI agent, Dennis, with an ax and our serial killer protagonist, Walter, seems to be catatonic about something… Walter eventually snaps out of it, holds the ax as the creature raises for the last strike, and the chapter cuts to the present. Dennis, on a mission, waiting for Walter on a park bench suspecting he’s responsible for music-related murder that took place recently. Walter does not seem concerned with it. The two are interrupted by a woman named Madeleine. She appears to know Dennis and takes him away to her cult’s headquarters.

I hadn’t read any of Wagner’s works before this comic but by God, I’m gonna give them a check now. At first, I was a little put off with the whole showing the climax as a prelude thing, but that was immediately dismissed once Walter walked into the scene. Walter is written as this feel-good, music-loving old dude who’s just living for life itself. But we already know he’s a psychopath so it just becomes more unnerving. The addition of a sudden cult grabbing Dennis in order to kick the story off was awesome and really changed the tone of the comic for me. There’s going to be a lot of violence paired with good music which makes for great comparison for the contrast contained in Dennis and Walter’s relationship. The real world paired with the optimistic one.

Hillyard’s line art is pretty fitting for this title. His work contains a similar approach as that of Ryan Ottley’s but with more simplistic anatomy, from what I’ve seen in this first chapter. The rest is all there, straight and precise lines draw the characters’ expressions and there’s a great level of details for day-to-day objects. Good stuff. His work on the violence and the gore is impressively detailed as well.

The series colors will be handled by Dave Stewart which is always fantastic news! His recent work in Ultramega has him working with darker tones so this title will be refreshing since it explores, at least in this issue, well lit scenes. It’s also exciting to see his name for the gore contained in the book. In both Ultramega and this first issue of Vinyl we get some great and creepy bloody scenes which only makes me more excited for the next chapters.

Lettering for this chapter was done by Ed Dukeshire and it’s tremendous work. As always, the part I notice the most in lettering are the sound effects and in Vinyl they are all portrayed in a very particular to the sound being portrayed. Join that with the presence of music and a variety of other sounds and it makes for a rich reading experience.

Vinyl started off with a great first chapter. A compelling story, art and makes for a fun and exciting read. This was just the beginning of the story and it feels a lot has already developed. This series has great potential and I cannot recommend it enough if you’re a fan of slasher stories.