Hyde Street #3 // Review
It always feels at least a little strange seeing Christmas decorations up in late January. It always feels like something rather serious went wrong with someone if there’s still Yuletide celebration going on well after the new year. There’s one place where the ill and incongruous feels right, though...and that’s exactly where Christmas finds itself in Hyde Street #3. Writer Geoff Johns and artist Ivan Reis continue the holiday festivities into January with inker Danny Miki and colorist Brad Anderson. There’s a solidly respectable darkness about the tale that feels perfect for January as a couple of agents of Hyde Street team-up on a particularly awful guy in a Santa suit.
The gentleman’s name is Samuel Karpis. He’s not a nice guy. Goes around late Christmas Eve breaking into people’s houses dressed as Santa and openly stealing them under cover of Claus carrying a big sack that wouldn’t look even remotely out of place in a nice neighborhood with big, expensive presents the evening of December 24th. His actions are going to find him on Hyde Street where a strange-looking elf and a guy wearing x-ray specs. Someone is going to get a punishment that goes way beyond coal this Christmas Eve.
Johns is mixing a couple of different things in his latest entry into the chronicles of Hyde Street. While there’s a perfectly enjoyable story of a criminal getting what’s coming to him in the foreground, there is also the small matter of the biggest agent around helping someone out who just wants to get out of the business as quickly as possible so that he can find out the fate of his own daughter. Johns is constructing a really interesting world that feels somewhere between the Twilight Zone and Hell. It’s a fun place to visit every month.
Reis and the rest of the art team are drawing on the darker end of traditional holiday imagery. There’s a very sharp sense of the classic images being bent around traditional horror imagery. As often as Christmas has been explored in the horror genre, there’s still some very compelling images that might work here and there. Reis pulls considerable darkness out of Santa being attacked by an elf in his own sleigh. Idealized notions of a white Christmas turn quite bleak in a promising third entry into a very appealing new series.
There’s a standard horror trope that always has audiences cheering on the horror. There’s always that sense that the people being victimized might actually deserve it in some way. It helps get audiences on the side of the horror before the final girl survives or the hero is pulled through the hell of it all in triumph. The genius of Hyde Street is that it tends to focus on the victims who deserve what’s coming to them without too much distraction from the rest of what makes horror so horrifying. It focusses on the fun at the beginning of the horror story...when you’re still enjoying the horrors do their thing.
