‘Hollow Heart #1’ Review: Give me More Mech Suits

Writer: Paul Allor / Artist: Paul Tucker / Vault Comics There is always going to be a small part of me that gets unreasonably excited when I see a large mech suit. There is an inherent fascination with robotic exoskeletons that just speak to me, and there are oh so many different manifestations and stories that can be told that feature a mech suit. Hollow Heart is not a robot story, although one of the characters is indeed confined to a robot. Rather it has more in common with Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, where instead of a fishman there is an entity in a robotic suit and his caretaker and the complicated circumstances that surround the whole debacle. And appropriately enough, there is also an extended fish metaphor, but Hollow Heart is out here telling a very different story in a very different medium and is doing so incredibly well.

It’s not often that I am completely floored by the words and artwork to the point where I don’t know which to address first. Allor’s writing is captivating from the jump, with an air of intrigue from the first line and an expertly crafted cadence, bolstered immensely by how he lettered the opening anecdote with fragmented text boxes with small, but significant markings. Tucker’s artwork has a brilliant contrast of colors and you immediately feel at a home in the heavy sci-fi setting, reminiscent of Alien and its kin. And the principle figure, El, has a simply iconic look that is both familiar and unsettling in the best ways. Ther…