Heart Eyes #1 – Dennis Hopeless, Victor Ibanez, Addison Duke, and Simon Bowland
Heart Eyes is a tale of hormones, happiness and the end of the world. Lupe wanders the wastelands of the former America, ravaged by both merciless attacks of monsters and the bombs sent to destroy them, but she does it with a smile on her face. Read on for a spoiler free preview of the latest Vault Comics soon-to-be hit title…
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
For a book about the apocalypse, Heart Eyes is pretty, well, pretty! Victor Ibanez (Aquaman, Domino) manages to make the end of the world look like a decent place to be, and with the assistance of Addison Duke (The Rush, Barbaric) even the giant tentacle monsters manage to look good! The opening page gives us an idea of what we are in store for – fun, bombastic, and just a little bit gruesome. I love it.
The art gives us a real feel for post-apocalypse San Antonio, with the attention to detail in Ibanez’s backgrounds a particular highlight. Seeing ruined roads, crashed cars and fallen bridges is one thing, but seeing plants starting to grow through the broken asphalt, or fences being swallowed by vines, adds a sense of time passing that might otherwise be missed. This for me is one of the real joys of comics. It doesn’t need to be explicitly laid out for the reader that time has ticked on since the world ended, we are just given enough clues to work it out for ourselves.
Without spoiling anything there is one specific page that uses a visual device I remember used best in Crowded, which gives a real sense of movement and depth. Equally effective here, it allows the narrative of the book to flow without taking up lots of page-based real estate. And that means we get even more story, and some cracking art!
And I feel fine.
Dennis Hopeless (Sea Of Stars, X-Men) is on top form in Heart Eyes, he brings the reader on Lupe’s journey, through the abandoned wilds and beyond, with humour, wit, and heart. The characters that we meet with her are fully-formed, with distinct personalities that jump off the page. I can’t wait to see more of them as the story progresses, and there is a cracking cliff-hanger at the end of this issue that just makes me want to read #2 straight away!
Hopeless drops a smattering of flashbacks into the main story sequences, in order to fill in backstory and flesh out the characters, and he is not afraid to drop equal parts gore and grief in doing so. The world may not have ended as the narrator anticipated, but the few people who survived its ending have brought their own baggage with them into the new one.
The writing is perfectly matched by the brilliant work of letterer Simon Bowland (The Marvels, Sandman: Nightmare Country), who brings Hopeless’ words to life, brilliantly laying out the text to complement the art, and making brilliant use of sound effects to add to the drama.
If you are looking for a new title to read that offers a bit of intrigue, a smattering of romance and some cracking character pieces, then Heart Eyes #1 is the book for you. The team that Vault have assembled here is full of superstars, who are all bringing their A-game to the page. Available to pre-order now from your friendly local comic bok shop, Heart Eyes #1 is due for general release on Wednesday 17th August.
You can follow the creative team on Twitter for more comics goodness:
Dennis Hopeless – Writer
Victor Ibanez – Artist
Addison Duke – Colourist
Simon Bowland – Letterer
Adrian Wassel – Editor
Vault Comics – Publisher
