One of the most enduring George Carlin sentiments about “save the world” environmentalism boils down to the simple edict: “The planet is fine. The people are fucked.” That seems to be the starting point for the new Vertigo project The Hinterkind, by writer Ian Edginton and artist Francesco Trifogli.
“Seven months from the top of the food chain to endangered species,” says The First Book of Monday about the fate of humanity, as we see the island of Manhattan overrun with foliage and wildlife, with grass and trees growing on rooftops somehow. The writer of that book may be our lead character of Miss Prosper Monday, who lives on the island with what she knows is left of humanity, bow-hunting zebras with her friend Angus without parental permission. Her grandfather is a doctor who wants to set out towards Albany to try and see if he can help some other people he’d been communicating with who have broken contact. No one’s been off the island in years, and everyone’s afraid of marauders and plague, but Doc is set on going – just as set as he is on making sure Prosper stays behind. However, things change when Prosper walks in on Angus and discovers he’s grown a secret tail, which prompts him to leave the village before they decide to exile him and his sister Sophie.
Naturally, the restless Prosper tags along with Angus, but soon, they run into a pack of ligons, which are tigers with lion manes (notably not ‘ligers’ or ‘tigons,’ which are actual cross-breed animals), and that’s a bunch of danger, but the real trouble comes when they learn the truth about what’s beyond their village – purple six-armed giants, man-eating troll goblins, talking tri-corns, and bat-wing demon women with shotguns in service of a mysterious queen.
It feels very much in the vein of all the current Hunger Games/Mortal Instruments properties that are all the rage, and could easily be dismissed as such. But the excerpt from “The First Book of Monday” at the end gives me pause and makes me think Edginton’s onto something more than just storyboarding what he hopes will be a new movie franchise. The text there speaks of human arrogance to think the worst had passed and that they were prevailing heroes in their own saga, without realizing that they “were in fact storybook villains with a reckoning long past due.” If our young protagonists are going to turn out to be the villains to all these seemingly savage new creatures, there could really be some interesting things happening here.
Could be. If that’s not the case, it looks to be somewhat derivative, and only a mild curiosity for fans of this particular Young People In Genre Land area, although it may need a few issues to kick in. The fact that the big giant actually says “fee fi fo fum” (although spelled differently) might indicate a heavy Fables vibe, too. Trifogli’s art doesn’t make a significantly compelling case for it, either. The giant is pretty cool, the general creature design is kind of neat and the landscape of jungle-grown New York is striking, but the human faces are often sloppy, and there are moments where Prosper looks like an inflatable doll.
The Hinterkind #1 may well lead to something good. But it just as easily could lead to nothing particularly special.
