Review: HOUSE OF PENANCE #1

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HOUSE OF PENANCE #1
Written by Peter J. Tomasi
Art by Ian Bertram and Dave Stewart
Published by Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: April 13, 2016

The Winchester Mystery House: An architectural oddity that was home to Sarah Winchester, whose belief in ghosts kept the mansion under constant construction as she sought a safe hiding place from her demons. But could those demons be real?

House of Penance #1 is a fictionalized exploration of the history of one of the strangest houses in America, the Winchester Mystery House. Construction on the house began in 1884 and continued, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the next thirty-eight years, without any formal plan or involvement by an architect. The house is littered with doorways to nowhere and stairs that end in void. The mansion was, at one point, seven stories tall, with forty bedrooms, two ballrooms, forty-seven fireplaces, two basements, three elevators, and one working toilet (but over a dozen fake bathrooms, designed as decoys).

The comic takes place in 1905 and follows Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company fortune. We see Winchester throughout her day. We observe her strange rituals and odd utterances, her obsession with her dead husband and infant child, and her peculiar superstitions, apparently tied to guilt about the death-dealing source of her wealth. We also follow Warren Peck, a mysterious gunslinger who finds his way to the house after staggering, wounded, away from a massacre.

This issue lays the foundation for a complicated and layered mystery. It deftly weaves back and forth between Winchester and Peck, and — when it follows Winchester — between her very calm and professional public persona (shown with her hair neatly pulled into a bun) and her more frantic private self (hair wild and falling into her eyes).

The reader is left with a passle of questions: Why are there doors and stairways to nowhere? Why does Winchester sleep in a different room every night? Why is it essential that construction on the house never cease, even for a moment? Where do Winchester’s superstitions come from, what has she done, and what is she hiding from? We receive no answers in this issue, but it promises a gripping story to unfold over the next five issues.

The art in this comic is astounding. Ian Bertram draws in a turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century macabre style that is evocative of Thomas Nast’s political cartoons and Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies. Characters are drawn as grim caricatures and the house has a surreal, M.C. Escher quality. Wide, unblinking, unsleeping eyes are used throughout to depict characters haunted by guilt, who have seen things they can never unsee.

A recurring sound effect, BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! appears on nearly every page. It disrupts panel borders into discordant peaks and valleys and is used both for the sound of guns firing and for the ceaseless pounding of the hammers that work non-stop on the endless construction of the Winchester House. Dave Stewart’s colors complement the art well, using muted oranges, browns, and purples to match the somber mood, with vivid splashes of red when the story turns violent.

That violent turn, however, presents a significant problem for this issue. Early in the book, Peck massacres a settlement of American Indians. Their deaths are depicted quite violently, seen through the scope of Peck’s rifle and framed by his unblinking eye. He then fights hand-to-hand with the last survivor, who is drawn as animalistic, practically feral. It’s striking. It’s shocking. It’s also a fairly cliché depiction of American Indians. It uses them as stock victims to introduce us to and advance the story of the white main character. In 2016, that’s not acceptable.

I am fully cognizant that Peck is not a good guy. I am well aware that bad guys do bad things. I am also reasonably certain that, over the course of the full series, Peck will be made to pay for his sins (the title of the book is House of Penance, after all). I fully accept all of that. But a gory depiction of the slaughter of American Indians is lazy and hurtful.

There’s another significant issue that’s intertwined with the massacre. Captions tell us the slaughter occurs on the San Joaquin River in Northern California. A number of tribes resided in or near the San Joaquin/San Jose area, notably the Yokuts and Muwekma Ohlone tribes. As Peck leaves, the sole survivor of the settlement utters a curse, “Ch’iidii dil.” The curse comes from the Navajo language, a language not spoken by any of the tribes in the San Joaquin area.

To find someone who might have shouted that, you have to travel roughly a thousand miles east to the Four Corners region, around which the Navajo had been settled on reservations by 1905. The settlement comprises three tipis, a type of house common to the Sioux and other Great Plains tribes, but not used by the Navajo, the Yokuts, the Muwekma Ohlone, or any other tribe in the San Joaquin area.

This may seem like gotcha nitpicking, but it’s not. Because the creators did a lot of research for this book. They studied the historical Sarah Winchester and duplicated her foibles. They include lots of small, accurate details on the construction of the Winchester Mystery House. Perhaps one could come up with a backstory that explains why a group of Navajo moved a thousand miles west to settle in Yokuts territory, where they built Sioux tipis. But the simpler explanation is that the creators didn’t do the research on this.

That’s troubling, because if the creators didn’t care to get the details right on the tribe being slaughtered, it makes it clear that they are a plot device, not real characters. Their purpose is to die, to start Peck on his journey, and the details of their lives are utterly inconsequential. Doing research on the tribes of the area wouldn’t necessarily have obviated the issues with the slaughter, but it would have shown that the creators were treating the massacred tribe as more than just stock Indians. Which is what they are in the book as presented.

Then there is another problem. One of the workmen in the house is racist, and this is shown by having him start a confrontation with a black worker, whom he calls a familiar slur. The racist is chastised and there’s never a moment’s doubt that he’s in the wrong, and likely being set up for penance as the series continues.

While it’s doubtless realistic, having one character call another character a slur to show that they’re racist and bad is a very blunt instrument, and one that can have a visceral effect on some readers to, from what’s apparent in this issue, very little end. I’ve no doubt that this is a plot that will be expanded upon later, but for now it wasn’t handled as deftly or sensitively as it could have been.

There is a lot of promise here. The art is striking and unique, unlike anything else on the shelves today, and I’m genuinely curious to see where the story goes. The atmosphere is macabre and foreboding and gives a real sense of the weirdness of the Mystery House and its eccentric owner. That said, this issue’s problems can’t be overlooked. The writing gets lazy in unfortunate ways, and that really hurts the story. Moreover, its treatment of American Indians is difficult to excuse. It’s got a lot going for it, but be cognizant of its issues before diving in.

The Verdict: 6.5/10

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