“Gonna be a long night, it’s gonna be all right”
Geoff Johns continues cranking out these cool comics for his imprint, Ghost Machine, as we get the second volume of Hyde Street, which is published by Image. 
We get pencils by Ivan Reis and Francis Portela, inks by Danny Miki (Portela inks himself), colors by Brad Anderson, letters by Rob Leigh, and edits by Brian Cunningham. It costs $14.99 and its 110 pages long.
Hyde Street is an interesting horror comic, in that Johns writes it kind of like an old-school DC or Marvel anthology title blended with a more modern, long-form story, and it’s kind of neat. We have a bunch of characters who aren’t exactly admirable — they’re on Hyde Street because they suck — but they still have lives to live and there are more evil things out there, so we kind of root for them. We get the prologue, in which our resident psychic sees something bad coming, and it shifts to Pranky, who stole a mask from Mr. X-Ray in the last volume but didn’t realize it would get stuck on his face and turn him into a werewolf boy. They go to a surgeon, Dr. Ego, who puts Mr. X-Ray’s x-ray glasses on Pranky, which will get the mask off once he has a moment where he’s not a monster. We think there’s going to be a bunch about Pranky, but suddenly we shift to Dr. Ego’s childhood and how he ended up on the street and then to Clarissa, the psychic, and how she ended up on the street. Then we zip back to Pranky, who gets the mask off, but then we zip over to the Butcher, who’s been in a dungeon in the Frankencastle for some time. Clarissa saw the re-emergence of the Butcher, and she tried to do something about it, but Pranky manages to get him out of the dungeon, which is definitely not a good thing. 
The Butcher’s story is the big overarching plot, but Johns wends his way through it in an interesting manner.
The “origin stories” and Pranky’s attempt to get the mask off are nifty, and I wondered if Johns structured the issues the way he did because he had Portela draw the two issues with Dr. Ego and Clarissa, but there’s a good amount of the plot moving forward in those two issues, too, so they’re definitely not inventory stories. Ego’s journey from a kid who sees Marilyn Monroe getting plastic surgery from his dad to the top surgeon in Hollywood is nothing too new but still depressing, while Clarissa’s tale about how her sister turns into a dove who also inhabits the street is tragic. Pranky sees his mother, who was in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. She gives birth to Pranky in the camp, and he’s taken away from her, and witnessing that tragedy allows Pranky to have his non-monster moment and get the mask off. While he’s in the past, the Butcher appears and tells Pranky that he can help him get his mother back. Pranky, who is, after all, a child, believes him. Yeah, that doesn’t go well. The way Johns writes the arc is unusual, but it does work quite well.
Reis is a very good artist, so of course his art looks great here. The way he draws Dr. Ego’s two nurses (former patients of his) is terrific, as he doesn’t make them overtly horrifying, just uses thick blacks to imply the surgeries they’ve had and the effects they’ve had on their bodies. 
His vision of Manzanar is terrifying (abetted wonderfully by Anderson’s red-tinged coloring) — he uses harsh hatching to roughen up the art and make Pranky’s experience more visceral, and when he reaches the Butcher in his cell, Reis does a marvelous job showing exactly how bad an idea that is. Portela has a thinner, more precise line, which works quite well for the story of Dr. Ego and his patients, none of whom actually need plastic surgery, as Portela deftly shows. He is also used effectively for the Clarissa story, as she and her sister dress like old Victorians (the story is set in 1920, but they feel a bit old-fashioned), so his clean style works well with their ornate clothing. As with all of these Ghost Machine books, it looks great, and it’s nice that Johns is able to get such good artists, even for the fill-in issues.
The other Ghost Machine books that Johns is writing seem to belong to the same “universe” — I mean, we’ve already seen connections between them, and I assume Johns will continue with that — and I don’t know if Hyde Street falls under that or if it’s just a place for Johns and his writer friends to do some horror stuff. I don’t really care, because, so far, the horror stuff has been pretty keen!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
