The Comics Journal
Review of Blood Song: A Silent Ballad
by David A. Beronä
November 2002Blood Song is Drooker's new lengthy wordless comic that extends the themes of the devastation of the environment and urban alienation that he originally began ten years ago in Flood! (Dark Horse Books has recently reissued Flood! in a fine edition with a new cover and an introduction).
Blood Song tells the story of the woman who "makes her first appearance in the final chapter of Flood!," says Drooker, "leading a crowd into open revolt." This young woman comes from a primitive culture that lives happily in the jungle until her village is destroyed and her family murdered by soldiers. The soldiers chase the young woman deeper into the jungle where she witnesses vast forests destroyed by clear-cutting and mountains and valleys in flames. She escapes to safety in a boat that takes her to a crowded metropolis where men and women walk aimlessly like zombies, down the streets. Feeling exhausted the young woman sits down to rest and is assaulted by a policeman, who jabs her in the back for loitering. She eventually joins a crowd listening to a man play a saxophone. The music rises in a rainbow of colors and shakes up the automaton crowd. Policemen disrupt the crowd, beat the musician and confiscate his saxophone. The woman and her dog join the musician and together they walk through the city to the roof of a building where the musician has a tent pitched. They sit around a fire, share a meal from a can of sardines, and later, make love. The woman falls asleep beside the musician, safe inside their tent. In the morning, the musician kisses the woman goodbye and goes back to his soapbox where he played his saxophone the previous day. He begins to sing and a colorful cloud emits from his mouth. This attracts a large crowd that is dispersed by riot police, who shower gas on the crowd, wrestle the musician into custody and lock him in prison. Time passes and when snow begins to fall in the city, the musician is still behind bars and the woman, now pregnant, stands beside her dog waiting for the musician to return. She gives birth to their child inside the tent. The baby, resting in the mother's arms, cries out into the air the same colorful cloud as the musician's song.
Most of this narrative is told in gripping two page spreads, though when the girl enters the city, the panels are smaller, effectively showing the crowded environment and expressing urban entrapment. Drooker skillfully uses white, black, and blue in these pictures that are all engraved in scratchboard. "I then added thin layers of watercolor," says Drooker, "which counter-balance the sharp, jagged, linear effect of the scratchboard, achieving a softer, mist-infused atmosphere." In addition, there are certain events in the narrative where Drooker effectively uses a splash of color. For example Drooker uses a deep red when the young woman in the jungle first discovers menstrual blood between her legs. In addition, his riveting use of rainbow colors on the birds in the jungle, the music and song from the musician, and the baby's cry, heightens the flow of the narrative with unexpected visual jolts.
A device that Drooker developed in Flood!, and uses again successfully in Blood Song, is his use of the x-ray vision motif. Drooker looks through each individual appearance to the collective foundation of every human being--the skeleton. This not only shows the commonality of all human beings but also shows the insignificance of dress and appearances. Another device is Drooker's use of familiar industrial icons and technological apparatuses like satellite dishes and cameras.
The young woman in this work is shown dressed in white and is the personification of the human spirit. Her black dog, always at her side, except the night when she makes love with the musician, signifies her protector. The dog kills a bird for food when the woman is hungry and bites a policeman who threatens her. The dog is also the first to come to the aid of the musician after the police beat him. The girl feels save to approach the musician only after the dog allows the musician to pet him.
Drooker makes references to other woodcut novels (see TCJ No. 208 for an in-depth look at woodcut novels) such as the use of the female figure in Frans Masereel's Die Idee (The Idea); the scenario of battling a storm at sea before entering a city in Lynd Ward's Gods' Man; and the idyllic jungle life presented by Laurence Hyde in Southern Cross.
With Blood Song, Drooker has not only exhibited his growing skill as a scratchboard artist but has contributed another important work in the genre of wordless comics. Blood Song will shake up readers with a strong social statement in a fine-crafted tale.