It's rare to see a video-game adaptation succeed in any medium, particularly in movies. Little faith can ever be placed in something transferring mediums, and it oddly enough seems that one of the more difficult things to translate can be within the realm of visual media. But you'd think that translating a video-game to film could be easier than translating it to comic form, where images aren't moving and the reader has no agency in the story. However, where most "adaptations" succeed is not with directly redoing what the video-game has done, but expanding upon it. Such is the case with Titan Comic's Bloodborne.
Bloodborne was originally a video-game developed by From Software, a Japanese Studio that partnered with Sony to create the widely popular game. It's a game of horror and mystery, of death and decay. It's my favorite PS4 game to date and a game I enjoy revisiting from time to time. Thus, I was quite excited when I heard it would be getting a comic book about it, but was not sure how that would work given how limited the game is in terms of things like dialogue.
The comic forgoes that by dropping any pretenses that the main character, the Hunter, is supposed to be similar to the Player from the game. Instead, this character has their own personality and is actually from Yharnam, the city in which the game and comic take place. One of the faults of the Dark Souls comics is having little personality to the main characters involved, but here the Hunter has plenty of personality and wit and knowledge about the world to clue in someone who isn't up-to-date on Bloodborne.
One of the inherent flaws of the comic is that it is not meant to be something that a random person can just jump in at. There are far too many allusions to the events of the main game, through background images or characters that appear, that will confuse the everyday reader. I will admit that it does add to the mystery of the lore, but there's no explanation for why certain things are showing up at these points and why certain people can or cannot see them.
The final issue sheds some light on it, and it does so beautifully, with some of the best visual scares in a comic to date, as well as one of the biggest reveals in all of Bloodborne, game or comic. There's a sequence wherein the Hunter has to approach a creature they cannot see but have to try and feel for it and it's absolutely terrifying, I white-knuckled those pages.
The comic greatly succeeds in translating the fast-pace action and characters of the original Bloodborne, keeping to the traditional style of combat from the game in a panel-by-panel sequence as well as capturing the voices of key characters that appear in the game. It also expands on one that we get very little time with, and I think fans of the series will greatly appreciate seeing them.
The plot of the comic is essentially an escape mission: the Hunter is trapped in the nightmare, but has found a child that can produce the "cure" for the nightmare, and so the Hunter travels with the child to seek the end of the nightmare, and the child brings them to where they think that is possibly. All the while they are hunted by monsters from the game and are plagued by this odd sense of knowing that doom awaits them, and this world. The comic masterfully plays at what's truly going on for those that aren't as wise to the world of Bloodborne and gives chills to the people who have delved a little too deep into the lore (such as myself).
I wrote before the comic came out about how Bloodborne, the game, can capture the horror of just being still and in a moment of sheer dread (check it out here). I think it did capture that sense, but in a different fashion than I was expecting. Instead of having things close and personal, it showed, true to the story's Eldritch origins, the size and scale of the enemy at hand, and how insurmountable they would be to conquer.
Thus a large part of the success of the comic comes from the artwork, drawn by Piotr Kowalski. He excellently captures the complex designs for all of the characters involved with the comic and brings some great design work to those that are unique to the comic, like the child and Hunter. There's never a question of who is who or one thing is meant to be another.
All of his backgrounds are also done very well, capturing the feel and tone of every setting our characters are in. Kowalski is able to also bring that trademark dreariness of Yharnam to each place; even if it's just a clinic or a field, there's this foreboding feeling of doom hanging over everything (rightfully so). The game was always able to do so by having hollow sound effects and a world to walk around in, but Kowalski manages to do so with just the details of some of the backgrounds.
Complimenting that is Brad Simpson's colors. It's nothing spectacular, but it allows the details that Kowalski draws to come to life. One of the major antagonists and creatures looks only as good as it does because of how remarkably it is colored compared to its in-game counterpart. The large splash pages, too, allow Simpson's colors to really work and bring life to Kowalski's work already on the page.
Bloodborne is the surprise hit of the year for me; so far, it's front-runner as my favorite of the year, with only something like Mr. Miracle trailing behind it because of just how good it is. It's arguably the best comic Titan Comics has produced to date and is definitely one of their most unsettling, and probably one of the more unsettling comics to read in terms of visual horror.
If you enjoy Eldritch horror, check this out; if you liked Bloodborne, you NEED to read this comic. There are moments in this four-issue mini-series that gave me chills by just having experienced certain things in the game. It definitely pays respect to its source-material, which is a great thing to get to say about an adaptation. Well done, Bloodborne comic, well done.
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