The Veil

After reading the happy-cheery Jack Staff last week, I needed to get back to what I love best, and that’s horror comics. So this week I read THE VEIL, written by El Torres with art by Gabriel Hernandez. It was published by IDW, which has always had strong horror comics, and this book is a fine addition to the genre.

 

The Veil opens as Chris Luna, our heroine, is talking to a ghost. Luna helps those souls that can’t pass beyond this realm. In this case, once the police arrive the culprit is quickly brought to justice the ghost moves on. This may sound like a happy beginning but we quickly learn that all is not happy and cheery in Luna’s world. As a child Luna’s family was involved in a train accident. Luna’s parents were killed, but she survived and gained the ability to talk to the dead. As you might expect after such a tragedy, claiming to see and speak to the dead landed Luna in an asylum. Years later she was released and started helping various law enforcement agencies solve horrific crimes.  

 

At the best of times talking to ghosts isn’t very financially rewarding, but these days Luna’s just about broke. Not to mention talking to people who’ve met violent ends tends to wear on a person emotionally. When the opportunity presents itself to return to her hometown and rest, she jumps at the chance. 

 

Upon arriving home Luna meets another survivor of the train wreck. When she learns that children have been disappearing from the town she worries that a serial killer might be on the loose. When she starts seeing dead people everywhere, and suddenly has trouble distinguishing between the real world and the world of the dead, she knows that things are not right at her home. And she must confront the evil that has taken over her town.

 

If you weren’t able to tell from the plot, The Veil is a mish-mash of ideas. There are bits of The Sixth Sense, Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, and other horror movies and comics. But Torres makes the most of the ideas and weaves them into a compelling horror story. 

 

Torres does a good job keeping the reader guessing who’s dead, who’s not and, once Luna arrives home, what’s real and what’s not. Torres makes Luna a very compelling character. He presents the emotional toll of talking to dead people in a great way. Her power is as much a curse as it is a gift, and in this story it’s definitely a curse. Luna is an emotionally and physically exhausted woman on the edge of sanity at the beginning of the story. Reading her struggles upon her return home are very exciting.

 

Hernandez is a good artist. Hernandez’s stuff wouldn’t work for Superman but it’s perfect for this story. He manages to handle both the quiet scenes and the dead with equal ease. His figures tend to be square-ish but the proportions and perspective are correct, which is more than can be said for most superhero artists. His panel work is solid and the story flowed well. But his strength was in the color palette. The colors are muted shades of brown, with highlights of complimentary yellow and red throughout the book. The limited selection of colors really helps maintain the tension in the story.

 

Overall, The Veil is what you would expect from a horror comic. Well written characters, taut action and some very horrific settings.

 

- David Lee