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“If I could I wouldn’t want you/

but it’s getting late now and I can’t stop”

-Winona Oak, “Break my Broken Heart”

We can’t always control our emotions. Hell, I’m not sure I have many of those myself and even I know that. I’m sure emotions arrive and disappear in different ways for different people. Are they like tides, ebbing and flowing with varying intensities? Is it a flame, there in an instant, burning brightly until it’s extinguished, easily able to roar out of control? Is it a gust of wind, sharp, sudden, there one minute and gone the next? I suppose I would liken my own to the Christmas lights in my neighborhood. Absent most of the time, appearing slowly at first, shining brightly but briefly, and then, in almost an instant, gone with no trace that they were ever there at all. But there are parts we can control. We can control how we express those emotions and convey them to the world, and we can control how we receive the emotions of others.

In Hollow Heart from Paul Allor and Paul Tucker, El is a tortured soul within an electromechanical body experiencing immense pain. He’s an amalgamation of organs and machinery who has led an existence sheltered from virtually all experience and therefore from a vast array of emotions. All he feels now, trapped, poked, and prodded inside a windowless room devoid of life, is a pain so intense that escape is the only option, even if it means death. This is El’s expression. This is the cry El releases into the world in hopes someone will hear him. [Read more…] about Break My Hollow Heart: The Emotional Complexity of Vault Comics’ Latest