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A beautiful short, set in September 1991 with two 16yo protagonists in a small town in America — one non-binary, the other female and maybe queer?

It probably helps that I too was a queer 16yo in a small town in 1991 and Miller's choice of tracks, as well as this being a hopeful queer tale.

“The future is written, you might say. What will be will be. What’s the point of this? But so many futures are written. An infinite number, in fact. A billion trillion ways your story could end. I want to make sure you end up with the right future.”

As some of the more negative reviewers note, there are some points that don't quite hit — I'm pretty sure that permanent sense of impending doom was passing once the Wall had fallen, poets and trades unionists become presidents and Ceauşescu been executed, let alone the failure of the Soviet August coup, which I remember as bringing a sense of hope. That an early-90s small town teen would have had understood well enough to gloss over parental misgendering of a non-binary friend was not one of those points, though; I feel sorry for cis-het readers who can expand their imagination to time-travelling radio interference but not to a queer teenager's perspective on the world in the embers of the Cold War.

CN: abusive parent, mention of alcoholism and transphobia

Writer Allor describes Hollow Heart as being “the story of a man trying to save a monster, and inadvertently teaching him to be monstrous”; it’s a delicately paced story with both action and deep introspection, a “moody slow-burn” from the writer–artist pair who previously worked on Tet, “a startling, nuanced exploration of a conflict many of us thought we knew and understood”.

To quote the blurb directly:

EL used to be human. Now he’s a jumble of organs in a bio-suit. El is also in tremendous pain and has been for a very long time. Hope arrives in the form of Mateo, a mechanic brought in to work on EL’s suit. Mateo sees EL in a way no one else ever has. And what’s more: Mateo offers EL an escape.

Hollow Heart reunites Tet creators Paul Allor and Paul Tucker for a queer monster love story about the choices we make between giving our loved ones what they want and giving them what we think they need.

Queer writer–letterer Allor adapted from his experience of his father’s decades of living with chronic pain; to quote his interview with Preview World:

Empathy is a tool and a burden and a gift … Hollow Heart is about what happens when a largesse of empathy does the same thing. It’s about the overwhelming desire to relieve someone’s burden, and how that desire can warp our view of someone, transforming them from a complex being with conflicting wants and desires, into something more abstract: a person defined only be their pain, and by the need to remove it.

And illustrator Paul Tucker, responsible for both the line-art and the colours, brings beautiful depth to the story, including surprising emotion to a hot-pink skull in a mecha suit, and helps obscure the body-horror of our Frankenstein protagonist without removing the horror of the impact of violence.

And importantly, again to quote Allor, “Hollow Heart isn’t primarily a horror story about being queer; it’s a horror story about queer characters” — there is no homophobia, no sexual violence and no awkward coming out: “everyone is queer, … the monsters, the heroes, the villains, everybody”.

Alexandra Iciek puts it perfectly in her review of the 6th and final edition, describing it as being “as heartbreaking as it is genius”. Short and sweet — and beautifully illustrated — Hollow Heart is indeed a great queer monster love story horror and an interesting view into how good intentions towards disabled people are not what we need; intent is not magic and impact is what actually matters.

CN: slavery, murder, chronic pain, body horror, “well-intentioned” suppression of a disabled character's agency.