Hailstone

A neat little idea. We’re in the town of Hailstone, Montana sometime during the American Civil War. This was before there was a state of Montana, and possibly even before it was a territory, but we’ll let that slide. In any event, Hailstone is a company town, with the company in this case being the U.S. Army, which runs a giant munitions factory. Meanwhile, the good citizens of Hailstone are starving and living off of grudgingly bestowed government handouts.

Then people start disappearing from the woods around Hailstone, and there are sightings of a strange beast. Sheriff Denton Ross and his half-native deputy Tobias investigate and uncover a dastardly plot engineered by the commanding officer of the army factory, who turns out to be a mechanically-inclined Doctor Moreau. I won’t give too much more away, as they leave off revealing the monster until fairly late in the day and if I tried to explain it I’m afraid it wouldn’t make much sense anyway. It’s all steampunk science mixed with bits of fantasy, as steampunk often is.

It’s a pretty good comic though. It builds a bit slowly and I thought the native stuff was superfluous. But on the plus side there’s a stirring climax and the monster was quite an original invention. Also the twist at the end was unexpected, and not just for being so dark and downbeat. Like a lot of comics in this genre you can’t help thinking of the movie they could make out of it, but setting that aside I think it stands on its own as a thrilling read.

Graphicalex