The Last Visible Blog
Review of Flood! A Novel in Pictures
by John E. Mitchell
January 2008http://lastvisibledog.org/?p=133'
Flood! is a stark and silent work by a cover painter for The New Yorker that originally saw publication as a complete work in 1992, though Chapter One was done in 1986, Chapter Two in 1990. With the final chapter, the story becomes an apocalyptic trilogy of a city drowning and an artist beset by nightmarish visions of himself and the world around him.
Drooker portrays New York City of the time through the medium of scratchboard--every illustration is an engraved work, creating a negative stark quality to each image. This echoes throughout the whole work, bringing in an otherworldly portrait of a place that has been long lost in time.
The story follows the bleak existence of an artist as he loses his day job, indulges in hurtful romance and falls victim to the subterranean excesses of the city's own imagination. Eventually, the artist's own work flows out into reality, mixes with the decay of the city and cleanses through destruction.
The book's cover tells you everything you need to know about it--a thick-lined sketch of a man is overpowered by a heavy rain storm, his umbrella being violently tossed away, lightning striking at him out of the top corner of one side of the book. The image is realized in the cold blues and gloomy blacks, but at the center of the man's chest lies a deep red, glowing, vibrant heart.
It's an image that any city dweller might identify with.
In Drooker's powerful work, New York City itself is as much a character as any person portrayed--in fact, the humans whose movements are etched into the narrative can, at times, seem less like creatures at their evolutionary peak and more like vermin that has infected a body. If decay is the work of the vermin let loose, then the titular flood is a necessary cleansing--and the ending that Drooker provides walks the same line, challenging the reader to decide if it is a pessimistic or optimistic tale--or a little of both.
The bonus of the book is an extensive interview with Drooker, in which he has the opportunity to speak about the experiences and psychology that lead to such a vivid work, and about the technical prowess that were his tools to do so.
In Drooker's New York City, the landscape your body inhabits is inseparable from the way your mind perceives it--living in that overwhelming island can be a hero's journey dominated by illusion and horror for anyone who lives there, and Flood! functions as the last testament for any person who might require it.