it Happened on Hyde Street: Devour // Review
There is a lot of pressure on Lily to lose weight before the wedding. She tries to be responsible about it. Try to go on a diet and start exercising regularly. She doesn’t really have that much to lose. But there’s the pressure. And invariably there’s an inability to stick to the regimen she needs to take to in order to maintain what she needs to maintain and so she is taken to a place that her grandmother went to. She’s introduced to a specific product. It might just allow her to lose that kind of weight but she wants to lose. But what will the consequences be? Writer Maytal Zchut expires the darker side of self-improvement with artist Alex Sinclair in it Happened on Hyde Street: Devour. The one-shot horrro story feels like an expended version of something that might have showed-up in an old horror anthology in the 1950s.
What could the harm possibly be? It just comes in a white plastic canister. It’s called devour. Or white could possibly be so damaging. That would come in. Such a small container? He didn’t forget you even have it. But Lily needs some sort of assurance that she can keep the weight off for long enough to get those all important pictures from the wedding. I and it’s not like she’s selling her soul for it. She just wants to lose a little bit of weight. That’s all.
Zchur is exploring ground that has been explored quite a bit in other ways at other times. So much of the weight loss industry feels kind of like horror to begin with. All of the different things that people are willing to do to themselves to try to lose a little bit of weight. there are so many different genres of weight loss. And the role of horror in and of themselves. Eat the right things. Eat only certain things. Exercise and just the right way. Torture your body and just the right way. Maybe you just might be able to pull it off. Or maybe it’s just a matter of eating the right magic stuff. Or maybe it’s just a matter of getting the right surgery. it’s already a horror to begin with. It’s not that difficult to push weight-loss narratives in the right direction and watch them go. And that’s exactly what the author is doing here. It’s also very familiar. It doesn’t really have to be anything new. It just Hass to be familiar enough to be disturbing. And that’s exactly what it is.
Sinclair finds the right imagery to fuse the basic elements of the story with the overall format of a comic book. However, it doesn’t really engage at all that deeply. There is an anything in the imagery that feels inspired enough to really engage in the subject matter all that memorably. the horror of the packaging of the title product is pretty stylishly delivered. It’s introduced in the 1980s. And the label looks like it would’ve fit on a shelf of a health food store in 1984 whatever. Feels perfectly in sync with that. And maybe that’s all they really need for the visuals. That in a lot of emaciated people devouring things.
It’s nice to see them branching out and really trying to develop Hyde Street into something that would be sort of a universal symbol for the bizarre and poor. I’m trying to find a quaint little corner of the twilight zone on which to put a street like this. It’s kind of a fun idea. And it’ll be interesting to see what they do. Moving forward. Because there’s a lot that could happen on high Street. And it’s kind of cool to see a one shot that fits into the overall structure of the strange horror of it all.
