Dark Secrets
by James Roland
In a key scene (pun unavoidable) of Joe Hill’s graphic novel series Locke & Key, an adventurous ten-year-old, named Bode, literally unlocks his own mind, revealing myriad brightly colored images. One shows the boy wearing a superhero costume and zooming through a dinosaur’s jaws, and in another he simply rides his father’s shoulders with a smile on his face, an image that seems sweetly innocent at first, but considering his father was brutally murdered just a few issues earlier, it carries a deep emotional weight.
The series thus far (Volume 1: Welcome to Lovecraft and Volume 2: Head Games) works consistently at this level, a consummate blend of fantastical adventure and dark drama.
Hill’s narrative follows the Locke family and its adventures at Keyhouse, a gothic manor on the cliffs of a tiny town called Lovecraft in coastal Maine. Magic keys litter the house and surrounding property, and, when applied to the proper lock, each performs a stunning piece of magic. One key will turn the bearer into a ghost, another will change his gender, and a third creates a portal to any other door in the world. The Locke children use these keys to defend themselves from a dark force that haunts their family, a living skeleton from their father’s closet.
Amid this story, Hill masterfully interweaves an almost mythological backstory of the previous Locke generation, whose heroics and mistakes paved the way for the dangerous, present-day adventure. The writer jumps back in time at just the right moments, deftly using historical interludes to provide much needed exposition about the magical rules that govern his universe, as well as to deepen his characters’ development.
Like the best of modern comics, Locke & Key lets character drive its story. This is particularly true in the Head Games volume, which eats up far less plot than Welcome to Lovecraft. This works because every page and panel of Locke & Key serves a dual purpose. While Head Games aims to enrich old characters, introduce new ones, and set a darker tone for the installments to come, it interlocks these things so seamlessly that they are hard to tell apart. So when this volume devotes its first 30 pages to the life of theater director Joe Ridgeway, a character shown only briefly in Welcome to Lovecraft, it also drops endless clues about the Locke children’s parents and the magical elements that become essential later in the book, all while managing to give old Joe’s story a beautiful beginning, complex middle, and heart-wrenching end.
Two other great characters also get more page count this time around, each with his own secret loves and dark past. First comes the Locke children’s Uncle Duncan, longtime keeper of Keyhouse. With others to tend the place he’s anxious to move on with his life and live closer to his lover. But location can’t save him from the dark forces that follow his family. Soon Duncan begins to remember things from his childhood, puzzle pieces that might reveal the truth behind the magic keys.
Then we learn the story of Ellie, a local gym teacher, who harbors a twisted romance and a dark magical force in the form of her high school lover, Luke. Broken and alone, she falls to his seduction and to his murderous plans despite her protests. Swept up in her own memories, she breaks down psychologically, blurring the line between past and present in her mind.
These characters dominate the second volume of Locke & Key, as the past collides with the present, creating unexpected desires and dreams and blurring ethical guidelines.
Hill’s scripts are more nuanced than average comic fare, but it would be impossible to separate his prose foundation from its realization in the incredible artwork of Gabriel Rodriguez. The artist takes each element to an even higher level of complexity.
Rodriguez faces a huge challenge with the Locke & Key series. His art must remain cohesive throughout the series while encompassing the necessary visual styles and motifs of a very eclectic story. For instance, the settings run to old world gothic, and his attention to architectural detail is so complete you can almost smell the dust on old, wood grandfather clocks. Then the characters must balance the cartoonish needs of the genre against the demand for emotional resonance. If this wasn’t complex enough, add the magical element, which requires Rodriguez to think about what an imaginary monster looks like inside a Mason jar (a task that he explains step-by-step in a special section of Head Games), or what weird things live inside a child’s mind, or, possibly his greatest feat, to take the same character and draw him in both genders, displaying distinctly feminine and masculine qualities without confusing the reader.
Rodriguez and Hill’s technical mastery can be matched only by their artistic instincts. Together they’ve turned Locke & Key into the most exciting, artistically satisfying graphic novel on the market today.
And if ‘artistically satisfying’ sounds too stuffy and boring, there are also talking robots. TALKING. ROBOTS.
Available Now:
Volume One: Welcome to Lovecraft
Volume Two: Head Games
Volume Three: Crown of Shadows, Issue #1
Coming Soon:
Volume Three: Crown of Shadows
Head Games
Publisher: IDW Publishing
Writer: Joe Hill
Artist: Gabriel Rodriguez
Price: $21.00 (hardback), $16.00 (paperback)
