Drumheller #1 – Review

By: Alex Link (Story, script), Riley Rossmo (story, art, colors), Kelly Tindall (letters)

The Story: A guy who takes lots of hallucinogens teams up with an ex-girlfriend to do paranormal stuff.

Review: This comic is really trippy.  It’s about a guy who is slightly insane and takes a LOT of drugs.  There also seems to be a splash of the paranormal flitting about.  So, when the main character hears a voice coming from his bag of golf clubs or the mummified body he pulls out of a swamp starts to move, you can’t quite tell: Is this really happening or is it just a drug-induced hallucination.

And that’s really the hook of the first issue.  It’s all about that weird cross-over between hallucination and and reality.  There probably is a central “call to action” that is driving the plotline forward.  But – honestly – I read the comic two days ago and I don’t even remember what the story is all about.  The central story is really secondary to the weirdness.

That may make the comic sound shallow, but that kinda misses the point because the weirdness is so well done.  The opening scene shows the main character on a golf course, in a bathrobe getting struck by lightning.  Then he gets up and watches a peacock emerge from a rain puddle on the ground and fly away…..then he notices that the peacock (not a penHEN) has laid an egg in the puddle, so he picks it up and then sticks his face in the puddle and his face emerges from the puddle in the sky of another world where the sun is out.  It’s really trippy and weird.  It’s also the sort of thing that makes me appreciate comics as a medium.  You could write prose about this sort of scene, but it wouldn’t be graphic enough.  You could try to put such a scene in a movie or TV show, but it would almost certainly look like crappy CGI unless you spent a FORTUNE on the effects.  Comics are cool.

Of course, the thing selling all of this is Riley Rossmo’s art.  He just has a really good eye for atmosphere and the surreal.  He’s kinda done this sort of “edge of reality” story a bunch of times in Cowboy Ninja Viking, Green Wake and a few others.  He’s an exemplary artist and anything he does is worth checking out.  I still wish we’d get to see him do that raw, monochrome style from CNV and Proof again, but he seems to be going in a different direction.  I think his art loses something the more it is cleaned up and colored.