I am a fan of Phil Hester's artwork, but I'd almost be willing to give up seeing his art on a regular basis if it meant we could get more writing out of him. Deep Sleeper and The Coffin were both trippy horror gems, Firebreather is teen superhero fun with a twist and the first issue of The Atheist could be used as part of a class on how to write first issues. Hester blends a fascinating protagonist with a killer high concept (the dead are back, possessing the bodies of the living with little care for the original owners) and presents a story that is good for a limited run with a character who is good for a much longer shelf life. Hester hasn't done the writer/artist thing since The Wretch, so he's joined on this effort by John McCrea, who seems to have finally found a project that suits his talents and sensibilities as well as Hitman did.
Though he does occasionally break from the genre a bit (as with Firebreather), it's clear that Hester's writing interests lie in the realm of horror. The opening sequence of The Atheist, showing the awakening of ghosts in bodies across America, is chilling and foreboding and powerful. The dangers of a 17th century rapist waking inside the body of a co-ed, of a criminal waking inside an Air Force guard, of a mass murderer rising in a teenager with access to guns, Hester suggests what is going to happen rather than laying it all out, letting the readers' imaginations really create the horror. The effect is that rather than "oh, another ghost story," I was at rapt attention, wondering just how bad things could get if this was the example of the kind of ghosts that were coming back and what they were doing.
While the early parts of the book resonate very clearly as the work of the writer of Deep Sleeper and The Coffin, though, the second half of the book twists a little bit to more closely resemble the work of Warren Ellis. Certainly Antoine Sharpe, a professional skeptic and troubleshooter who casually convinces a death cult leader to off himself and then uses the head to force the rest of the cult to surrender, is very much in the vein of sarcastic and smart Ellis protagonists like Planetary's Elijah Snow or Transmetropolitan's Spider Jerusalem. Hester very effectively balances Sharpe's intelligence and abilities with a human sense of humor and curiosity, and so we stay in his head, find him just sympathetic enough to be a protagonist, even as his perceptions and abilities mark him as somewhat extraordinary. Like the quirky Fox Mulder on X-Files, Sharpe perfectly captures the sense of weird fun in investigating the paranormal as well as the more serious and spooky aspects of that kind of job, even if in temperament, he's more like Dana Scully.
Truly, I keep hoping that Phil Hester will go the writer/artist route, because he's one of the few creators who seems equally talented in both areas, capable of standing alongside legendary creators like Frank Miller or Matt Wagner in tackling both major aspects of a comic book production. In fact, I was quite pleased by the backup tale, a short foray into surreal horror that Hester writes and illustrates. If we can't have that on a regular basis, though, then I hope for more talented collaborators like Mike Huddleston (on Deep Sleeper) and John McCrea. McCrea first got my attention on Hitman, where his portrayal of sloppy, everyday life was the perfect match to Ennis's scripts, and he sort of drifted after that, into a variety of Marvel projects that were always solid but never seemed to fit his sensibilities. The Atheist is a better fit, calling for an artist who can portray normal people in normal situations and make that exciting, who can play up violence for shock or humor but who is capable of subtlety as well. McCrea's linework here reminds me a little bit of Hester's artwork, using a lot of shadow and spare lines, but he also evokes the style of Charlie Adlard of The Walking Dead.
The Atheist is a perfect blend of horror premise and intelligent, engaging character work that grabs the reader from page one and doesn't let go. The moment-to-moment writing is snappy and evocative, the artwork moody and yet perfectly clear and it features probably the most straightforward premise that Hester has created, although not at the expense of being interesting and full of story potential. Definitely one of the best things I've read all year. 10/10
