An incredibly angsty, edgy artist who paints grotesque paintings that come to life in Silent Hill, making him believe that he's the leader of this domain. How about survivalist cheerleaders that find machine guns and mow monsters down like they're nothing? Okay, what about our main character? He seems like he could be okay. Psychological introspection? Nah, we don't need any of that. Avoid at all costs.Įven worse than "The Grinning Man", "Paint it Black" is practically devoid of anything that makes Silent Hill actually Silent Hill. If you want a story that doesn't crap all over Konami's mythos, ignore Ciencin's work and pick up Tom Waltz's "Silent Hill: Sinner's Reward." Paint It Black is hackish fan fiction of the worst variety and an insult to the reputation of Silent Hill. But don't let them write comics on the material. It's hard to translate a video game to any other medium, I'll grant that, but when the subject of your games is psychological horror with Freudian archetypes and the subject of your graphic novel is gallons of black blood and sociopathic cheerleaders, well. When your protagonists inspire that much hatred and indifference for all the wrong reasons it makes us want to root for the demons that much harder, but we can't even do that because the bad guys suck rocks too.Īs a Silent Hill story, the problems are compounded exponentially. It has a main character so self-absorbed and emo that grass would cut him, a secondary cast of a dozen or so interchangable cheerleaders with the winning, faux-bubbly personalities to match, and a slew of monsters which draw forth yawns instead of screams. What's worse is that even if you took away the Silent Hill name, Paint It Black still fails as even a modestly compelling short story. Nothing he presents in this story has anything to do with how the setting works. What I can infer from reading this however is that he's never so much as flipped through a strategy guide much less spent any actual face time with the games themselves. I've never met Ciencin, so I've no idea what his level of exposure to the Silent Hill mythos entails. Scott Ciencin's run on the Silent Hill comic series is one of those times, and Paint It Black is an egregious example of what happens when you give the car keys to somebody who doesn't know how to drive. I genuinely hate writing bad reviews, but there are certain times when it's necessary to address major problems with the material.
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