Celebrating the Unpopular Arts
 

Review time! with ‘Against Hope’

“It’s funny what you know and still go on pretending with no good evidence you’ll ever see that happy ending”

Victor Santos has a new graphic novel out, and that’s always cause for celebration! Against Hope is published by Dark Horse, and I’m going to tell you about it!

If you know anything about Victor Santos, you know that in the past few years, he’s become one of the best artists in comics, even though he wasn’t shabby before this time, either. He also (presumably) got paid for Polar, which was adapted as a television series (which I still haven’t watched, because I suck), which seems to have allowed him to do whatever the hell he wants. And what he wants to do is write and draw violent crime fiction. More power to him!

I do have to say that Santos isn’t that great of a writer. He’s certainly not bad, but he’s much better as an artist, but luckily, he doesn’t try too hard with his writing, keeping things relatively simple, so that what we get is a story in service to the marvelous artwork. When you’re doing crime fiction, you don’t need to be a great writer (you can be, but you don’t have to be), because there’s something visceral about crime fiction that lets you enjoy it even if the writing isn’t great. Santos does fine with the story here, as he gives us a young woman named Hope Walker at different times in her life and bounces back and forth between them. Early on in the book, she’s killing a dog in the woods, then we jump ahead a decade (the book takes place across the 1970s to the 1990s, but 1986 and 1997 are the two main dates) and she’s entering a bar where neo-Nazis hang out and getting into trouble with them (Hope is not white, but Santos keeps her ethnicity vague – she could be black or Hispanic, but it doesn’t really matter, as all that matters is that she’s not white enough for these mouth-breathers). Then we go back and find out how she ended up in the woods and why she’s in the Nazi bar. She is taken to the woods by some Nazis, one of whom killed her boyfriend right in front of her (accidentally, although the person was yelling racial slurs at the boyfriend and wanted to fight with him, he just didn’t want to kill him), and they chase her to have some fun before they kill her. Obviously, she gets out of that, and ten years later, she’s looking for revenge. That’s pretty much it – the book is essentially two long chase/fight scenes, one taking place in 1986 and the other in 1997. I won’t say how they’re connected, but it’s not a bad little narrative hook.

That’s basically it, and you might not like that, and that’s cool. The story is pretty gripping, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen a million times, and it might not be for you. With comics, though, the “unwritten” part is more important than in any other art form (including visual ones like movies and television), and it’s a main reason why Against Hope is worth your time. Of all the artists working today, Santos is the one who most embodies the Steranko aesthetic, and he’s very good at it. He doesn’t draw like Steranko – he’s far more cartoony than that – but he designs books like Steranko, and while he’s certainly not the only one (Javier Rodriguez and ACO are two who come to mind), he might be the best at it. He loves full-page spreads with a lot of information on them, which is something Steranko excelled at, and he loves using small panels overlaid on the main spread to show small moments of action within the bigger picture. He also uses a lot of small panels with extreme close-ups of various parts of the action to make everything move faster while also slowing down the reader so we have to really look at each panel to see what’s going on. And he uses “staccato” panels – smaller panels inserted next to larger ones that show a small portion of a different moment in time to simulate quick movement. It makes reading a Santos comic a somewhat breathless experience, because just by using a different format, he makes the action move faster. It’s a very clever technique that not enough artists use. For the sections that take place in 1986 (and earlier), he uses a more painted look, with beautiful watercolors and brushstrokes that make things look a lot less horrifying than they are. He also uses thick black brushstrokes and fewer holding lines, which gives it the feeling of a slightly fuzzy memory. His coloring on these pages is based on tan, as sepia tones are a clichéd color choice for flashbacks, but for Santos, it implies a kind of autumnal brittleness to the woods through which Hope runs, as well as contrasting her terrifying run through nature with the more urban scenes in 1997. The coloring in the “present day” scenes is slightly more realistic, but Santos uses a lot of blues and red/pinks, for good reasons that I’m not going to get into now. He uses a thinner line, but he still drops holding lines a lot, which gives us cool effects when he edges figures with color instead of holding lines. Throughout the book he uses blacks really well, creating deep shadows for Hope and also creating some interesting negative space. This is a wildly violent book, but because Santos is so good as what he does, it’s very beautiful, too.

So here’s some of the examples of his art. The book is printed landscape style, so it’s far wider than tall. Just to let you know.

Nice composition here
This is what I mean by ‘staccato’ panels
Great use of blacks here
Another great composition. Pushing Hope to the right forces our eye over, and the streaks of red in the final panel imply downward movement of the knives, so although we see nothing, the panel with the eye in it on the left makes us believe that Hope is stabbing downward with her knives into the eye. Excellent!

You should always check out Santos’s work simply because the art is so good, and if he never really gives us a superb story, he always gives us an entertaining one. There’s nothing wrong with that!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

4 Comments

  1. tomfitz1

    At least 48% of Americans is “Against Hope” that Biden is the next president.

    Sorry man, I just couldn’t resist.

    It’s weird, Victor Santos is like a cross between Tyler Crook, Tim Sale and Eduardo Risso. Tell me I’m wrong!

  2. Bright-Raven

    Excellent book. Reviewed it on Quoth The Raven several months back. Believe I gave it 4.5 or 5 out of 5 stars.

    IIRC I likened it to the Bruce Timm, Mike Avon Oeming and Darwyn Cooke wheelhouse of visual style, with Alex Toth and Wally Wood design elements towards the noir. (But then Steranko learned noir from Toth, you know? And EVERYBODY learned from Wood for design elements.)

    1. Greg Burgas

      Louis: Yeah, they’re good comparisons too, in terms of style. The design is definitely Toth and Woody, but Steranko kind of went super-sonic with their design elements, so that’s why I lean that way.

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