#brad simpson

The Death of Sleep is the first, and imo the best, of these comics. This is the story of a Hunter before the events of the game, trying to understand the meaning of paleblood and trying to survive. For me, this is the best of the comics because of how much it plays with the idea of being a prequel to the story; it obviously telegraphs this with Iosefka still accepting patients, Old Yharnam not yet being burned and Djura being mostly friendly, but it also plays with the game mechanics being literally what it happening. We see the Hunter die and go to the Hunter's Dream, replaying stretches of the game and seeing enemies respawn. There's a sense of inevitable doom about it - this is not your Hunter, the Hunter who will one way or another win the game, but a Hunter who failed, a Hunter who died, a Hunter who struggled and bled like the rest of them but did not make it to the end. And that's interesting, right? This is the bleak kind of world that Bloodborne is. But maybe there's hope. The Hunter does make it to the Fishing Hamlet with the child, and while the child is not the paleblood that they need to end the Dream, they still manage to escape in a way. Out into the unknown.

The Healing Thirst is also a prequel, set among the people of Yharnam as things start to get bad outside, and follows a scientist and a priest as they attempt to figure out the source of the sickness that is covering Yharnam. If Death of Sleep is the best at showing the game world, this is the best individual, standalone story. There's a very real sense of the world crumbling and collapsing around the protagonists, and the desperation of their struggle to keep people alive and try and do what they can to survive. Not that they don't have their own secrets. The scientist begins to believe, while the priest's opinion of the church grows lower and lower as the story carries on, and not all is as it seems with these two characters. It's also interesting to see a version of this story where Hunters are antagonists, as opposed to the hero of the game.

A Song of Crows is focused on Eileen the Crow, the hunter of hunters from the game who is an early influence on your character. This is her backstory…sort of. It's weird. It's surreal, a story told out of time, spiralling around and around the same ideas. We see a funeral, a ritual, a boy drowning in a lake. Another hunter, this one with a human mask, is targeting her. It's very abstract, with similar symbols and ideas being repeated throughout. Honestly, I don't think I'm smart enough to be able to interpret it completely. If I were to pitch an idea, it would be that Eileen is so affected by the death of the boy - her friend - that she begun to get this deep respect for funeral rites and dying well that she shows in the main game. She is, towards the end of her life, haunted by the mistakes that led to the boy dying, to hunting hunters; something she is resigned to, but does not enjoy. The masked Hunter could stand for her guilt and grief, that idea that something has been chasing her throughout her whole life, something with an unknowable human face. It's a hugely interesting story, and I love Eileen so much.

The Veil, Torn Asunder is the weakest of the stories, in my opinion. It's got the surreal trippiness of Crows, but where it falls down is that the protagonist is not someone we already know. And, frankly, not someone I care about. Healing Thirst made me care about its protagonists, it gave them a lot of character and understanding, whereas this guy…was in a war? Killed people? Maybe? I don't know anything about him, because it's just that surreal nightmare nonsense over and over, but this time it's far less engaging. It doesn't help that this guy seems to have just murdered some sex workers, and there are women in his life but they only exist to be dead and motivate him, which. Ugh. I didn't like it at all.

The Lady of the Lanterns is the first of a duology following a set cast of characters - a pair of hunters, a boy whose sister was killed by the titular Lady of the Lanterns, and a few others. This explores a few things - the Chalice Dungeons, Queen Yharnam and the Pthumerians, the Winter Lanterns and the Chime Maidens. The latter two seem to be conflated, or at least placed together, which is an interesting place to go. The stories here are interesting, switching between the Hunter and her apprentice, the boy struggling to survive and his sister waiting for their father to return with food, the old Hunter that they try and help - it's all a very coherent story from the world of Bloodborne, and I really engaged with all of the characters here. I felt like the story telegraphed their whole deals really well, and I thought it was interesting. Although, did the boy really have to have a fridged sister? C'mon.

The Bleak Dominion continues the story, with the boy having been apprenticed to the Hunters until he went rogue, hearing the voice of his dead sister imploring him to lead the Hunters into a trap for Queen Yharnam, who rules the Chalice Dungeons. The Dungeons themselves are just sort of treated as a fact in the world of Bloodborne, so I think it's interesting to see the characters reacting to them being this strange, otherworldly, nightmarish thing. Similarly, seeing the Chime Maidens respawning enemies is just sort of a thing that happens in video games, but imagine seeing that in real life? Nightmarish! That's the strength of these two comics, I think, they take things from the video game and place them into more of a realistic setting, and that makes the reader reevaluate exactly what these kind of things would be if you encountered them in real life.