Flood & Blood Song

Two breathtaking works, both wordless, apart from one brief sequence in Flood that is a comic produced by the protagonist. I guess if we were defining ‘graphic novel’ from scratch, we might come up with something like these works: stories of real depth and substance, told in pictures instead of, not as well as, words.

The earlier work, Flood, is more brutal in appearance and substance. A man in NYC spirals down into the gutter after losing job and home; and then a cartoonist works as the city floods, at least in his mind. This sounds a pretty short synopsis, but as I mentioned, these are works where the images carry the weight. Those images are immensely powerful, looking very like woodcuts, black and white except where we are seeing the work of the cartoonist, which has added blue. There is a rubbery, Crumbish quality to the first section, a bounciness despite the hellish depiction of life in New York, whereas the second part has an angularity that makes it closer to Drooker’s great inspiration, Frans Masereel. They carry a huge impact, many among the most striking graphic images I’ve seen. They also seem to carry a loathing of the city, and it’s only intermittently interpretable as coming from a leftist perspective.

Blood Song is more appealing, I think, for various reasons, and maybe even more impressive. The story has a young woman in a SE Asian village, which is then wrecked by Western troops. She escapes, accompanied by her dog, first through the forest and then by sea, finding herself in a new city (this is not quite resolvable to New York – I think he is going for something more universal than the specificity of Flood). There is once more brutality in the army scenes and again in the city, but not only is there a redemptive touch right at the end, there is a different sensibility in the art. It is less jagged and stark, partly because the one extra colour, a greyer blue in this, is there constantly, relieved several times by flashes of beauty in extra colours, most notably an immensely warm orange. The art is also less concerned with making everything look terrifying and overwhelming, giving us lovely landscapes, forests and, particularly, butterflies. Again, there is some anti-authoritarian politics in this, but the centre is a human story demonstrating real caring.

I was hugely impressed by Flood and its unforgettable imagery and force, but I completely loved Blood Song for its unique beauty and genuine warmth.

See also the interview with Eric Drooker.