Days of Hate is a bit of a mystery for me. Jumping into the series with absolutely no context or history made this challenging not just to review but frankly to read. The author needs to remember that every comic is potentially someone’s first comic. You see this is a pretty long comic, a good 30 pages of “story”“. The initial problem is that the first twelve pages of this comic are completely without any dialogue at all. Further there is no sort of exposition in that time either to help establish the story or the setting for a new reader. I actually couldn’t make it through this comic the first time around. I got bored and set it aside to read something else. Now this could have been remedied with some in story information being imparted to me with devices like news blurbs on a tv, radio broadcasts, passing conversation between neighbors on the street. If Mr Kot wanted to keep the story free of dialogue for the first third of the book I could have still been given the much needed exposition by way of a newspaper on a coffee table, radical flyers or even graffiti. Because in all honesty this comic really needed something like that.
I can’t help but feel that Kot is thinking very cinematically when he is writing this comic. Nothing wrong with that, I do the same when creating my own book, but what works in a film doesn’t always translate to static images. You see in a film like say Ghost Dog, which plays out with the first act having no dialogue, the camera moves or the actor emotes or there is some action goiing on in the background to generate and maintain interest. This isn’t impossible to do in a comic but it can be difficult and in this case the writer and artist failed to get me invested in the story. I have no idea what’s going on for so long, and no reason to care, that by the time the story starts to get underway I’m just not invested in it. I have no real desire to finish the tale. Once we get into the actual story I’m still left to draw heavily of deductive reasoning to till in the gaps in my knowledge. The creators clearly expected anyone who picked up this book to have read the previous issues and that is a fatal mistake in my opinion.
The set up seems to be a world in which black people in America are heavily oppressed in some manner. Unfortunately I don’t know how or why only that a woman Kayla has been keeping the daughter of a man named Arvid safely hidden from the authorities because Arvid went off to “stop it”“. It’s frustrating not to know what’s going on for the entire length of a comic book like this. There is some pontificating about the nature of the world that these people live in, about how humanity is basically murderous in nature, that we are better at killing than building houses. It’s a rational that just has no weight in this particular comic as I’m never given any evidence of such. It feels like Kot wants to treat a potentially dystopian tale like The Walking Dead, but it just doesn’t work here.
ART
The art is unfortunately bland. A great majority of the panels are very clearly heavily photo traced or referenced. It just feels like the artist did very little actual drawing. Now this sort of thing can be done well as Alex Ross has proven but his work tends to be quite the feast for the eyes whereas this is not. Perhaps it was done for the sake of a gritty realism but it just feels uninteresting and a bit lazy sadly. The artists does manage to establish a dour mood through the use of heavy spotting blacks and a somber color palette.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I just can recommend this book, by itself it has very little to offer a new reader. 1 out of 5!
[yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
Days of Hate 12
Writer: Ales Kot
Art: Danijel Zezelj
Colors: Jordie Bellaire
Letterer: Aditya Bidikar
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