Review by Frank Plowright

Best known for The Goon’s period blend of action and humour, Eric Powell takes a very different path for Hillbilly, which delves into old American folklore, a topic hardly over-explored in comics.

The Hillbilly is named as Rondel as he reveals the unfortunate circumstances of his birth and the cruelty of his childhood in a remote woodland community. He carries a cleaver from the Devil’s kitchen, given to him in thanks by a trapped witch he frees, but she then burns his home down and transforms his mother into a pig slaughtered to feed the village. It’s among a continuing selection of creative horrors Powell cooks up for his cast, with threatened children a feature recurring through the series.

He’s been around has Rondel, and alongside his habit of killing witches with the Devil’s cleaver he’s picked up plenty of stories during his wanderings, some due to his uncanny ability to see folk other people don’t. As with The Goon, Powell’s seemingly incapable of drawing beauty. His people begin as plain on the scale and descend from there. Even children, usually pictures of innocence, are buck-toothed and cross-eyed, and the creatures of the woods are universally ugly, with witches coming in varied gruesome forms. Powell’s evocative portraits and sparse landscapes are given depth by watercolour on the border separating grey and green, but he’s capable of surprising with the colour, especially in the final story of a cursed fiddle.

Although Rondel is first seen as an elderly gent, Powell sets the disturbing vignettes at different periods during his life, and in one case leaves matters hanging, perhaps to be picked up at a later stage and perhaps not. There’s thought given to the assorted relationships, and Powell has an ear for dialect, meaning distinctive dialogue, which includes animals, Rondel not being the only person capable of speaking with them.

Atmospheric and elegantly horrific, Hillbilly is a quick read, but creatively memorable with more to follow in Volume Two.