There’s a girl. She’s being adopted. On the day that she’s adopted, a little black cat shows up. The girl’s new parents are eager to make her happy, so they let her keep the cat. She doesn’t have to beg or anything. There’s something strange about the cat, though. And there’s probably something strange about the girl, too, in Hairball #1. Writer Matt Kindt opens up a new series for Dark Horse Comics featuring art by Tyler Jenkins with colors by Hilary Jenkins. The weird horror elements of the story run the risk of seeming more than a little silly, but Jenkins and Jenkins do a solidly good job of selling the creepy ambiguity of a promising new series. 

They said that the girl was developmentally delayed. She wasn’t. They said that she was sad. She wasn’t. She might have liked the cat, but there’s some suggestion that she might not have begged for it if they were reluctant to let her have it. The cat has a darkness about it that goes way beyond fur. There’s something deeper in it that seems cold and emotionless. Meanwhile, the girl’s new parents are fighting. There’s some question of possible infidelity. Things are about to get worse for everyone in the house.

Kindt clearly respects his subject matter. There’s a deep respect for the common house cat that seems to resonate off the page. The complexity of the little girl is also given a great deal of respect. A lot of the deeper emotionality of the first issue comes from a steady narrative hand that never attempts to reach for too much rendering. There’s just enough dialogue to introduce everyone involved in the story. There’s just enough exposition to introduce readers to the mystery that he’s going to be exploring.

Jenkins and Jenkins have a hell of a lot of work to do with the first issue. Cats are cute. It would be all too easy to let the black cat be cute...just lounging there in the middle of the panel as the sinister shadows of horror begin to creep out of it. It would also be all too easy to simply present the cat as some kind of predatory monster from the start. Instead...Jenkins and Jenkins go for a very earthbound kind of domestic realism. The cat is coaxed to the page in a way that feels almost...clinically straightforward. It’s an approach that works quite well. And the horror is, of course, incredibly disgusting. So there’s that. (I mean...you’d get that much from the title.) 

There’s a dark drama to the series that could run the risk of being really, really silly, but Kindt, Jenkins, and Jenkins are taking the subject matter very seriously...which COULD backfire in future issues, but the series’ premiere feels like a sharply-rendered horror drama from beginning to end. And that’s a hell of an accomplishment given that it’s a horror story about a black cat and an adopted girl.

Grade: B