Black Hammer 8 featured Reviews 

“Black Hammer” #8

By | April 20th, 2017
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

Welcome back to the ordinary rural town of Rockwood. Enjoy your stay. Oh, and mind the spoilers, y’hear?

Cover by Dean Ormston
with Dave Stewart
Written by Jeff Lemire
Illustrated by Dean Ormston
Colored by Dave Stewart
Lettered by Todd Klein

There’s something unusual about the sleepy farming community of Rockwood: it’s now the home of Spiral City’s mysteriously vanished superheroes. But not by choice: they were banished to the town after a battle with the Anti-God, and now they’re stuck within its boundaries. Lately, a new arrival in town has started asking questions, and she’s discovering that its superpowered residents aren’t the only strange thing about Rockwood…

This is not a superhero comic book. Yes, it stars characters who were heroes ten years prior. But in setting the book in a small rural town where no heroics can occur, we’re left with only the slow, emotional drama that comes with being stuck in a place where you don’t want to be.

Most apparent to me in “Black Hammer” is its melancholy aesthetic. Every few pages we get a big establishing panel of a short building or group of buildings, along with the natural landscape around it and the blue sky up above. Nothing is so detailed that it looks hyper-realistic, nor is anything so stylized that it becomes a cartoon. Ormston finds just the right balance to express the natural beauty in simplicity. In being at odds with the nature of certain characters in the book, this simplicity creates a healthy amount of tension. These panels, in addition to setting the scene, go a long way towards establishing the overall tone of the book.

To this end, Stewart uses a muted, natural color palette. There are no neons, no bright hues, no stunning contrasts in “Black Hammer.” Everything feels like reality, occasionally a little darker when necessary but for the most part taking place in the ordinary daylight. In this case, it feels carefully chosen to maintain the book’s aesthetic.

Okay, now for the elephant in the room: based on concept alone of old retired superheroes living their lives while slowly uncovering a bigger mystery, “Black Hammer” sounds a lot like “Watchmen.” This book, however, reads nothing like “Watchmen,” mostly for two reasons. First is the previously discussed melancholy of the “Black Hammer” characters in their present situations, compared to the pessimism of the “Watchmen” characters becoming disillusioned about their past. The motivations of these characters come from a completely different place, and the direction they want to go is completely different. This issue in particular focuses on Golden Gail feeling stagnant, unable to move forward with her life. She is happy with her past. She feels no regrets. She just wants to move forward, to live her adult life, like she started to just before being stuck on the farm.

Second is the breathing room Lemire gives to every scene here. “Watchmen” was a dense, intricately constructed narrative that demanded reader focus. Lemire, however, paces “Black Hammer” so the reality of these lives fully sinks in. The wide open spaces become real through the use of larger panels, and the long periods of introspection become real through silent panels or panels with few words in them.

And just because there are few words in some panels doesn’t mean they are devoid in meaning. Just as Ormston found beauty in simplicity with his art, so too did Lemire with the dialogue. One scene switches between flashback panels and present panels, and the present ones are completely silent except for three repetitions of a single word. The past panels provide the meaning, which turns into subtext in the fairly empty present panels beside them. There may not have been many words in some places, but those were equally as important as the places that did have words. This scene also shows off Klein’s lettering skills, as he switches the font to be bolder, larger, and in a dark orange balloon for the final emphasis of this word. It works perfectly with Ormston’s panel, which shows only the character’s distressed head against a completely white background, to give that moment the emphasis it needs.

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Similarly, even when there are sections where there is a lot of dialogue, the conversation you witness rarely has to do with the words the characters say. The pinnacle of this comes during the two-page church scene between Barbalien and his pastor. On the surface, these characters talk about the bake sale at the church. Underneath, though, the pastor is reaching out to a lost soul while Barbalien is falling deeper for his forbidden love. Shallow words about muffins fill these pages, yet behind them we see the tender touch of an arm and reserved delighted looks. What we see and what we read tell completely different stories, and the combination of the two results in deeper meaning than either could have alone.

In addition to all this, “Black Hammer” has the plot hook about Lucy investigating the town’s secrets. Even when all characters are caught up in their own personal in-the-moment dramas, moments like these keep the overarching plot moving forward. This issue also delivers a shocker at the end, which will lead to some major drama next issue. I can’t wait to see how it all pans out.

In all, “Black Hammer” gives readers something completely different from what superhero characters are used to. There are no big fights here, no heroes and villains. Just a bunch of broken people trying to move forward with their lives, no matter how futile. Lemire, Ormston, Stewart, and Klein have created a sad little world that I can’t wait to come back to month after month, and this issue continues the trend.

Final Verdict: 8.3 – Another bittersweet, moving issue of “Black Hammer.” Check it out if you’re looking for something different from normal superheroics.


Nicholas Palmieri

Nick is a South Floridian writer of films, comics, and analyses of films and comics. Flight attendants tend to be misled by his youthful visage. You can try to decipher his out-of-context thoughts over on Twitter at @NPalmieriWrites.

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