“Of all my demon spirits I need you the most”
Geoff Johns has begun to farm out his “Ghost Machine” stuff to other writers, and we’ve already gotten Peter Tomasi’s ones, and now we get a “Hyde Street” mini-series, Sisterhood, which is written by Maytal Zchut, drawn by Leila Leiz, colored by Alex Sinclair, lettered by Rob Leigh, and edited by Brian Cunningham. 
It comes from Image, naturally, it costs $16.99, and it’s 172 pages long — the main mini-series is 122 pages, and then there’s a 50-page one-shot at the end of it. Let’s take a look!
Sisterhood is a decent horror story, although it’s not too great. Sophie and Violet are childhood friends who go off to college together, with Sophie spending all her time doing schoolwork while Violet wants to party. Violet rushes a sorority and drowns in a pool during a hazing ritual. Karma, the sorority president, doesn’t exactly kill her, but her negligence certainly leads to her death. Sophie is upset, then she gets angry when the university brushes the incident under the carpet. She ends up on Hyde Street, where she finds a so-called psychic who somehow melds Violet’s soul with Sophie’s, so Violet inhabits Sophie’s body and can talk to her. Naturally, she wants revenge, and she pushes Sophie to rush the sorority so that she can get close to the people who allowed Violet to die. This is, from Sophie’s perspective, a horrible idea. Violet can possess her body without Sophie knowing, so she can kill people without Sophie knowing, so of course Sophie gets the blame. Sophie immediately tries to stop Violet, but, well, that’s a lot harder than she thinks. Things, of course, spiral.
This is a fairly standard horror story, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. 
Sophie can’t figure out how to stop Violet, and because this is a nasty horror story, things do not work out very well at all. Of course, because I’m a jerk, I wonder what the entire point of this is. Maybe Zchut is just having some fun, but it might be that this is bleakly cynical, because Violet is wildly bad at her revenge — she kills a lot of people, sure, but does she really achieve anything? Maybe that’s the point — revenge is bad, people! — and I hope it is, because otherwise, it’s just mean. There’s some of the idea of what makes people friends and why Violet is kind of a bully (she certainly doesn’t deserve to be dead, but she’s still a bully) and what Sophie can do about her problem, but it’s not that deep. I mean, that’s fine, but it still seems like the story could be less evil and a bit more interesting. It’s just bad people doing bad things to each other, with a lot of collateral damage. In much the same way, the one-shot does not end happily, but it’s a bit different because the characters in it are desperate. A woman who wants to lose weight for her wedding is encouraged by her mother and grandmother to visit the health store on Hyde Street that we saw in the original mini-series, whose proprietor has a secret ingredient to help you lose weight. It’s horrific because it’s a good social critique, but it’s also a horror story, and the ending, while bleak, fits the theme well. Sisterhood lacks that, even if Zchut seems to want it to. It acts like it wants to be a bit more than just bleak horror, but it’s not, and it feels a bit empty.
Leiz’s art is solid if unspectacular. She tells the story pretty well, although a few some of her pages feel a bit crowded and it makes them a bit confusing to follow. 
The biggest thing she does well is use the water motif that comes from Violet’s drowning, as a lot of panels have watery borders and when Sophie sees Violet, she’s in reflective surfaces, which can be puddles and other small bodies of water, and Leiz does a nice job with that. In the back-up story, she does a really nice job with the three main women — Patricia, the bride, is definitely not fat, but she’s just curvy enough that you can see why she would think so, while her mother and grandmother are thin, but not so much that it’s creepy. Leiz makes them look just thin enough that it’s vaguely disturbing, which is a nice trick. The visual representation of “fat” people makes the story work, as it’s a better critique of the weight-loss industry with the visual element added. Leiz knows what she’s doing, certainly, but it’s nothing amazing.
I don’t love Sisterhood, but it’s a decent enough horror story. I guess I just don’t love something so bleak unless it’s really, really well written, but this isn’t. It’s not poorly written, it’s just it’s not amazing. Still, if you dig horror, you might want to check this out!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
