Review: Hillbilly, Volume 1

Hillbilly, Volume 1 by Eric Powell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Graphic novels are a fair bit like movies. They depend on the talents of a diverse cast and crew. It’s most evident in the writer/illustrator link, but it extends to other elements as well: inking, lettering, layout, cover design, and even marketing. It takes people who are expert in all those dimensions to pull the whole together. We can assign someone the “starring role” – the writer usually has the status of a film director while the artist is more like the cast of actors – but it’s still generally a collaborative effort.

Eric Powell may be the most significant double-, triple-, or even quadruple threat in graphic novels. He writes with an entirely distinct rhythm, somehow referencing 1930s slang (in The Goon) or Appalachian lyricism (here), and creating flawed heroes with compelling agendas. Everything is simultaneously over the top and understated, with characters who are both archetypes (the toughest and meanest hombres) and yet subtle in their interactions with others. Add to that Powell’s being arguably the most talented artist in the business, and it’s no wonder no other one-man band can touch him. Now, with Hillbilly (and I admit to not knowing all the details) he’s back into self-publishing as well.

I love The Goon, and if you haven’t read all or good-sized chunks of it, I recommend starting there. There’s a flamboyant joy to almost every page. The big, bright illustrations pull you in, and then you find yourself talking like Frankie or the Goon. There’s something primal in it, something that makes you think it was always there and Powell simply uncovered it for the rest of us to see. It’s as brilliant in its way as Krazy Kat.

The Hillbilly is promising – I’ll certainly try to check out Volume two which I understand came out a week or two ago – but it falls a bit short of that organic whole. The art is as strong as ever, at times even more brilliant. The story seems a bit more contrived (though “contrived” isn’t necessarily a complaint since both Hillbilly and The Goon turn on short episodes that come to us out of chronological order). The Hillbilly hates witches for what they did to him as a child, so now he’s pledged to destroy them all. That means, so far, a certain sameness to each situation.

But the biggest difference is in the general dark wash across the whole work. In place of the technicolor of The Goon, we get a subdued color tone. There’s a grey that pushes against the fundamental fun, the basic joy, of Powell’s art. As beautiful and inventive as this is, it’s a little less fun than The Goon. In keeping with that, the one character who returns from The Goon to this series is The Buzzard, an intriguing but somber creature who, beginning as a human sheriff, evolves here into Death itself. So, yeah, interesting but not quite as joyful as something like Frankie promising enemy mobsters a “knife in the eye.”

I have no way of knowing how much of that is Powell’s decision and how much is the result of his using different collaborators in things like inking. In any case, if the result is slightly below average Powell, it’s certainly well above average as a graphic novel. What’s here is good. If Powell can expand the premise and recover some of the humor, this could be great.


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