Written by Arvid Nelson, Art by Jeyong Mo Yang
Tokyopop, 192 pp.
Rating: Older Teen (18+)

Based on the video game of the same name, Hellgate: London depicts events leading up to the focal point of the game, namely a demonic invasion on Halloween night. The primary characters are John and Lindsey Fowler, two teens who are about to discover some very dark family secrets.

The story is strangely familiar: two siblings, a magic sword, a dark family secret, and a connection to an ancient order of knights. Yes, I think we’ve seen this before, but now it’s got some occult and horror flavor sprinkled here and there. John and Lindsey are such generic figures that they add to the book’s “been here, done that” feeling. They’re not particularly fleshed out or compelling and spend most of the book being told where to go and what to do by other people. John’s a nice guy with an apparent darkness within, while Lindsey’s a young firebrand who speaks her mind. That’s all the depth you’ll be getting here.

The plot takes center stage here, and it’s a bit blah too. There’s all sorts of weirdness with an unearthed corpse, a mysterious medallion, and a rather odd looking sword, not to mention John and Lindsey’s quest to find out what’s going on. What they find is a mysterious past littered with the occult and ties to the Knights Templar and that’s when Hellgate: London starts to get interesting, as the story touches upon the history of the Fowler family: their involvement with the creation of the London Underground (giving this subway system a kind of occult significance), an ancestor who was alive during the Black Plague, references to the great fire of 1666. All of this is quiet interesting, but there’s just too little of it and too much “now go do this.”

The art’s nice enough, though it felt a bit more western than I’m used to encountering in Tokyopop graphic novels. Everyone looks different, but the character designs aren’t anything amazing, plus the backgrounds are usually absent. Still, the monsters are nice enough, and the shock moments are fairly well drawn. There’s no real image or visual moment that really jumps out. It’s solid enough, just a bit bland.

It’s interesting to note that Hellgate seems be quite the multimedia franchise. There’s at least one more volume coming from Tokyopop, a preview to a novel based upon the game, and around the time the game originally launched, Dark Horse published a short mini-series based on it as well. In the end, Hellgate: London is just an OK read–nothing ground breaking or amazing, but nothing offensively bad either. It did get me curious about the world’s history, not to mention Arvid Nelson’s own occult conspiracy comic series, Rex Mundi, so I suppose that’s something.

Volume one of Hellgate: London is available now.