Vinyl #1 details a retired FBI agent’s kidnapping by a murderous cult of flower children and his “best friend”/serial killer’s attempt to rescue him. No matter how absurd that concept seems, and it’s every bit as wild on the page as it is in a summary, I couldn’t escape the sense that I had read this story many times before when perusing this issue. It’s not simply that writer Doug Wagner and artist Daniel Hillyard previously published another eccentric Image Comics series featuring a serial killer in Plastic, although Vinyl doesn’t do much to distinguish itself. It’s that no matter how “strange” this story strives to make itself, it’s ultimately a contrafactum placing some new details and lyrics atop a very familiar tune. This is a serial killer presented as idiosyncratic anti-hero possessing seemingly superhuman abilities in a setting that exudes “strange” from every panel. We’ve seen this before in Nailbiter, Hack/Slash, and an entire generation of stories stewed in creative brains that encountered Natural Born Killers at a young age. And while it does everything to make itself appear unique, it’s anything but original.
