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Silent Hill #2 story 2
Silent Hill: Paint It Black
Painter and semi-professional slacker Ike finds his dark muse in the mist-enshrouded, monster-infested reaches of Silent Hill. Then the sexy, survivalist-trained, gun-toting cheerleader Cheryl and her teammates arrive to rock his world. Creatures attack, cheerleaders disappear, and the gloves come off! Will anything survive?
56 pages, Paperback
First published March 9, 2005
3 people are currently reading
175 people want to read
About the author
Scott Ciencin
163 books80 followersScott Ciencin was a New York Times best-selling novelist of 90+ books. He wrote adult and children's fiction and worked in a variety of mediums including comic books. He created programs for Scholastic Books, designed trading cards, consulted on video games, directed and produced audio programs & TV commercials, and wrote in the medical field about neurosurgery and neurology. He first worked in TV production as a writer, producer and director. He lived in Sarasota, Florida with his wife (and sometimes co-author) Denise.
(Also wrote under the pseudonyms Nick Baron and L.J. Oliver)
(Also wrote under the pseudonyms Nick Baron and L.J. Oliver)
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 1, 2015
I genuinely hate writing bad reviews, but there are certain times when it's necessary to address major problems with the material. Scott Ciencin's run on the Silent Hill comic series is one of those times, and Paint It Black is an egregious example of what happens when you give the car keys to somebody who doesn't know how to drive.
I've never met Ciencin, so I've no idea what his level of exposure to the Silent Hill mythos entails. What I can infer from reading this however is that he's never so much as flipped through a strategy guide much less spent any actual face time with the games themselves. Nothing he presents in this story has anything to do with how the setting works.
What's worse is that even if you took away the Silent Hill name, Paint It Black still fails as even a modestly compelling short story. It has a main character so self-absorbed and emo that grass would cut him, a secondary cast of a dozen or so interchangable cheerleaders with the winning, faux-bubbly personalities to match, and a slew of monsters which draw forth yawns instead of screams. When your protagonists inspire that much hatred and indifference for all the wrong reasons it makes us want to root for the demons that much harder, but we can't even do that because the bad guys suck rocks too.
As a Silent Hill story, the problems are compounded exponentially. It's hard to translate a video game to any other medium, I'll grant that, but when the subject of your games is psychological horror with Freudian archetypes and the subject of your graphic novel is gallons of black blood and sociopathic cheerleaders, well....
I understand. Some people just don't get Silent Hill. That's OK. But don't let them write comics on the material. If you want a story that doesn't crap all over Konami's mythos, ignore Ciencin's work and pick up Tom Waltz's "Silent Hill: Sinner's Reward." Paint It Black is hackish fan fiction of the worst variety and an insult to the reputation of Silent Hill. Avoid at all costs.
I've never met Ciencin, so I've no idea what his level of exposure to the Silent Hill mythos entails. What I can infer from reading this however is that he's never so much as flipped through a strategy guide much less spent any actual face time with the games themselves. Nothing he presents in this story has anything to do with how the setting works.
What's worse is that even if you took away the Silent Hill name, Paint It Black still fails as even a modestly compelling short story. It has a main character so self-absorbed and emo that grass would cut him, a secondary cast of a dozen or so interchangable cheerleaders with the winning, faux-bubbly personalities to match, and a slew of monsters which draw forth yawns instead of screams. When your protagonists inspire that much hatred and indifference for all the wrong reasons it makes us want to root for the demons that much harder, but we can't even do that because the bad guys suck rocks too.
As a Silent Hill story, the problems are compounded exponentially. It's hard to translate a video game to any other medium, I'll grant that, but when the subject of your games is psychological horror with Freudian archetypes and the subject of your graphic novel is gallons of black blood and sociopathic cheerleaders, well....
I understand. Some people just don't get Silent Hill. That's OK. But don't let them write comics on the material. If you want a story that doesn't crap all over Konami's mythos, ignore Ciencin's work and pick up Tom Waltz's "Silent Hill: Sinner's Reward." Paint It Black is hackish fan fiction of the worst variety and an insult to the reputation of Silent Hill. Avoid at all costs.
February 18, 2019
"They were having a pillow fight. Negligees, harmless fun. Have to blow off steam somehow with all the pressure we're under."
This was good, better than Among the Damned. The art was great and the story was OK if not a little out of character for Silent Hill. Character design, in relation to the games was good, and Pyramid Head makes his comic debut (unless I missed him somewhere, this was a 'blink and you miss it' cameo) overall it was good...3 🌟
This was good, better than Among the Damned. The art was great and the story was OK if not a little out of character for Silent Hill. Character design, in relation to the games was good, and Pyramid Head makes his comic debut (unless I missed him somewhere, this was a 'blink and you miss it' cameo) overall it was good...3 🌟
March 23, 2022
Damn.
Even worse than "The Grinning Man", "Paint it Black" is practically devoid of anything that makes Silent Hill actually Silent Hill. Psychological introspection? Nah, we don't need any of that. How about survivalist cheerleaders that find machine guns and mow monsters down like they're nothing? Okay, what about our main character? He seems like he could be okay. An incredibly angsty, edgy artist who paints grotesque paintings that come to life in Silent Hill, making him believe that he's the leader of this domain. A better story would have constricted Silent Hill around him slowly, broken him to bits right at the end. Instead, he goes toe-to-toe with Pyramid Head in some reason with the Rambo cheerleaders, and barely anything interesting is done with the concept I was at first on board with.
Not to mention there is a huge time skip in the middle of the book THAT JUST HAPPENS. It's never addressed. The cheerleading characters are introduced as though we're supposed to know who they are. The dialogue is awful. It's honestly no wonder Silent Hill didn't really make it out of the 2000s alive, and was finally butchered in the 2010s (with the few exceptions of Shattered Memories and PT, and the soundtrack for Homecoming).
Whew. Extremely disappointing.
Even worse than "The Grinning Man", "Paint it Black" is practically devoid of anything that makes Silent Hill actually Silent Hill. Psychological introspection? Nah, we don't need any of that. How about survivalist cheerleaders that find machine guns and mow monsters down like they're nothing? Okay, what about our main character? He seems like he could be okay. An incredibly angsty, edgy artist who paints grotesque paintings that come to life in Silent Hill, making him believe that he's the leader of this domain. A better story would have constricted Silent Hill around him slowly, broken him to bits right at the end. Instead, he goes toe-to-toe with Pyramid Head in some reason with the Rambo cheerleaders, and barely anything interesting is done with the concept I was at first on board with.
Not to mention there is a huge time skip in the middle of the book THAT JUST HAPPENS. It's never addressed. The cheerleading characters are introduced as though we're supposed to know who they are. The dialogue is awful. It's honestly no wonder Silent Hill didn't really make it out of the 2000s alive, and was finally butchered in the 2010s (with the few exceptions of Shattered Memories and PT, and the soundtrack for Homecoming).
Whew. Extremely disappointing.
July 22, 2021
Un ejército de Harley Quinn's caen en Silent Hill...
bueno, la primera parte es interesante, incluso no me esperaba esa explicación de por qué empezar a redecorar la habitación del pintor y me latió el punto. Solo que eso echa a perder la historia, porque o los demás personajes eran monstruos que sabían sobre el protagonista, o de plano las harley quinn fueron demasiado impredecibles.
Lo que me latió fue, de nuevo, el agregado de colores rosas al fondo tan negruzco y el estilo del cómic.
bueno, la primera parte es interesante, incluso no me esperaba esa explicación de por qué empezar a redecorar la habitación del pintor y me latió el punto. Solo que eso echa a perder la historia, porque o los demás personajes eran monstruos que sabían sobre el protagonista, o de plano las harley quinn fueron demasiado impredecibles.
Lo que me latió fue, de nuevo, el agregado de colores rosas al fondo tan negruzco y el estilo del cómic.
January 20, 2022
Although it's an improvement when compared to "the Grinning Man" and "Among the Damned," the story still misses the mark in effectively incorporating the Silent Hill mythology. The premise is somewhat interesting, exploring how "invading" someone's space can affect them, but the protagonist and the writing are not engaging enough to explore the multiple dimensions that could've been explored to make this an insightful read.
June 28, 2018
Great artwork and concept! Never displeased with the Silent Hill comics and this one follows through.
March 13, 2018
Holy Shit. After Holy Terror and Superman At Earth’s End I didn't
think any other comic I read would challenge it. Well, I was most
certainly wrong. Look no further than this 48 page “Horror book”.
This book centres around a painter named Ike who is down on his
luck and gets evicted. In search for a place to live he embarks on
a quest and finds the most safe and home like place in the world:
Silent Hill. This book SUCKS ASSSS. First of all the characters are
more flat and empty than the fuckers from Holy Terror. They of
course annoyed the living shit out of me, and they didn't act like
humans. The dialogue is primitive, cringe worthy and each character
speaks their mind. The main character eventually witnesses a brutal
slaughter at the hands of monsters and reacts to it as if he saw……
….nothing. He’s kinda psychotic. Not to mention he uses the word
“Yo” almost as much as Frank Miller uses the word “Goddamn”. The
rest of the supporting characters who are a team of stranded cheer leaders also
had me as interested if I was reading Taxes for Dummies. Only that
would have been more interesting. There is no explanation about how
Ike ended up finding his way to Silent Hill and how long it took him to
get there. Speaking of time, Scott Ciencin clearly has not conception of
it. At all. There will literally be a skip to a year later with no indication
what so ever!!!!!!!!!! In fact this book rarely explains any of the dumb
shit that happens. This book also isn't scary in even the slightest sense.
This isn't horror. It is just a really bleak and dark lazy excuse for a
comic. Just when you think it can’t get any worse the author throws
in another stupid detail that keeps forcing the book into incompetence and
cringe, often contradicting the mood entirely. Distinguishing dreams
and reality is also impossible because of how shit the art is. Yes this
is one of the worst looking books Iv’e ever read. Top five worst for sure.
Each page is DISGUSTING. With horrifically bad colours and drawn
to such unbelievable scratchy ass shit, it blew my mind to even think this
got printed. The book does such a piss poor job at visually showing what
the characters are doing, I had no idea what the fuck was happening for
98% of the first half. There comes reviews like this, where nothing I say
can illustrate just how truly atrocious this comic really is. I found my
self speed reading almost all of the book and hating the characters all
the way through. They are just idiots who do what ever for what ever
reason, at what ever time. The story is weak as fuck, I will admittedly say the ending has one-one millionth of a decent action scene, but thats
truly it. Silent Hill: Paint It Black. One of the most incomprehensible stories
Iv’e ever read that somehow managed to make me compare it to Holy Terror.
Pure Shit. Letter Grade: (-F)
think any other comic I read would challenge it. Well, I was most
certainly wrong. Look no further than this 48 page “Horror book”.
This book centres around a painter named Ike who is down on his
luck and gets evicted. In search for a place to live he embarks on
a quest and finds the most safe and home like place in the world:
Silent Hill. This book SUCKS ASSSS. First of all the characters are
more flat and empty than the fuckers from Holy Terror. They of
course annoyed the living shit out of me, and they didn't act like
humans. The dialogue is primitive, cringe worthy and each character
speaks their mind. The main character eventually witnesses a brutal
slaughter at the hands of monsters and reacts to it as if he saw……
….nothing. He’s kinda psychotic. Not to mention he uses the word
“Yo” almost as much as Frank Miller uses the word “Goddamn”. The
rest of the supporting characters who are a team of stranded cheer leaders also
had me as interested if I was reading Taxes for Dummies. Only that
would have been more interesting. There is no explanation about how
Ike ended up finding his way to Silent Hill and how long it took him to
get there. Speaking of time, Scott Ciencin clearly has not conception of
it. At all. There will literally be a skip to a year later with no indication
what so ever!!!!!!!!!! In fact this book rarely explains any of the dumb
shit that happens. This book also isn't scary in even the slightest sense.
This isn't horror. It is just a really bleak and dark lazy excuse for a
comic. Just when you think it can’t get any worse the author throws
in another stupid detail that keeps forcing the book into incompetence and
cringe, often contradicting the mood entirely. Distinguishing dreams
and reality is also impossible because of how shit the art is. Yes this
is one of the worst looking books Iv’e ever read. Top five worst for sure.
Each page is DISGUSTING. With horrifically bad colours and drawn
to such unbelievable scratchy ass shit, it blew my mind to even think this
got printed. The book does such a piss poor job at visually showing what
the characters are doing, I had no idea what the fuck was happening for
98% of the first half. There comes reviews like this, where nothing I say
can illustrate just how truly atrocious this comic really is. I found my
self speed reading almost all of the book and hating the characters all
the way through. They are just idiots who do what ever for what ever
reason, at what ever time. The story is weak as fuck, I will admittedly say the ending has one-one millionth of a decent action scene, but thats
truly it. Silent Hill: Paint It Black. One of the most incomprehensible stories
Iv’e ever read that somehow managed to make me compare it to Holy Terror.
Pure Shit. Letter Grade: (-F)
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews