4-Color Review.com
Review of Blood Song: A Silent Ballad
by Andrew Duncan
2002Eric Drooker's books are wordless. A series of detailed and thoughtfully composed woodcuts combine with purposeful splashes of color to craft silent, beautiful, and allegorical narratives of surprising drive and complexity.
Heavily influenced by the graphic fiction and political passion of mid-20th-century Belgian woodcut artist Frans Masereel (along with other graphic fiction pioneers and political upstarts such as Lynd Ward, Otto Nuckel, and Giacomo Patri), Drooker creates angular, enveloping worlds of light and dark, pain, melancholy, oppression, and love.
Drooker's new book, Blood Song, begins in a small, idyllic East Asian village. A young girl returns from getting water at a nearby river to find her home and those of her neighbors being destroyed by a group of heartless soldiers who bear a suspicious resemblance to a Vietnam-era U.S. Army. The girl and her dog flee through the jungle to a rowboat that takes them across the ocean to a dark and menacing city.
A story of struggle, survival, hope, and rebirth, the fable-like Blood Song is a generally upbeat creation, entirely befitting of its subtitle: "A Silent Ballad." More epic, plot-driven, and slightly preachier than Drooker's past work, he takes a softer approach to the art by making it less jagged and confrontational. In doing so, I think his work loses some of its overall power, but it's still altogether impossible to remove your eyes from page after wondrous page.
Coinciding with the publishing of Blood Song is Dark Horse's re-release of Drooker's impressive early-90s effort, Flood!. Reading the largely metaphorical Flood is to walk through a dream--albeit a grim and surreal nightmare of modern living--but a dream nonetheless. An alcoholic drone leaves for work to find his plant closed, and then sets out on a lonely trudge through a heartless metropolis only to disappear.
A figure leaves the rain-soaked streets of New York, boards the subway, and passes out. He has a dark, sensual, primeval dream of caves, animals, and jungles. The figure is woken up by the cops and returns to his dingy apartment, where he commences working on a comic book about Eskimos and the dark side of U.S. history. It continues to rain.
Drooker's art in Flood reflects his themes. It's gritty, bleak, and atmospheric, and much harsher than in the later Blood Song. The book's ending is positive, but only slightly so. Originally published during a time of economic confusion and societal uncertainty, Flood has obviously retained its significance.