Comics Bulletin
Review of Flood! A Novel in Pictures
By Craig Lemon
October 2002A very unusual book for Dark Horse, this is the tenth anniversary edition of Drooker's graphic novel, formerly published by little-known "Four Walls Eight Windows." Drooker has had his paintings on the covers of The New Yorker, The Progressive, The Village Voice, et al.
The story concerns a city dweller in the last days of the 20th Century, in the first part of the book (it is split into three chapters) we see him head off to work--and he has a hell of a lengthy journey, dominated by going up flights of stairs; it's his ascent into the heights, towards his heavenly (if you will) work. Except it's closed down. And he has to go back down . . . back to reality, back to the mundane world, and then his descent continues . . .
. . . into part two, simply called "L", as the protagonist descends firstly towards the L train, and then further--presumably towards L for Limbo. Much of this is in his own imagination of course, a fevered hallucination whilst riding the subway.
Just as he rises towards ground level again, the third part of the story, Flood, kicks in. And it rains. And rains. And RAINS. And we see that the guy is actually a comics artist are heart, he returns to his studio, struck with inspiration, and pulls together a Mary Poppins-esque adventure, a freak show with hidden depths; these scenes are the first splash of colour (and dialogue) in the book. Yes, the book is mostly black-and-white and wordless, with just splashes of brilliant blue in the comics sections plus some captions and dialogue in the same place. Frank Miller provides a quote on the inside cover, it makes you wonder if he saw the spot colour used in this book and it inspired him to do the same with Sin City a year or two later?
The rain doesn't let up whilst this act of (comics) creation is going on, with natural consequences--his cat makes it out, you will be relieved to learn, in the highly amusing and apropos finale.
The lack of words doesn't really hurt the book at all--in fact, when they do appear you almost wish they didn't. Some parts of this book are very hard work to get through, to understand just what the heck is going on. It's the end of the first section, particularly--that whole section is superbly designed, kicking off with full-page panels, then moving to two panels per page, then four, then sixteen, then sixty-four, then 256 on the final page of this section. The last three pages of this section are the ones you can have difficulty with, it's not overly clear exactly what is going on, the temptation is to skip panels and get go for getting an overall feel for what is going on--essentially the guy's descent into despair.
Certainly not a run-of-the-mill comic, and definitely a thought-provoking and interesting read--but be warned that it reads better second and third time around than first!