Author: Ed Brubaker
Publisher: Diamond Book Distributors
Rating: worthy!Illustrator: Sean Phillips
Colorist: Elizabeth Breitweiser
This is quite an amazing and a rather disturbing graphic novel, written for a mature audience. I haven’t read any of the previous volumes, unfortunately, so I came into this hitting the ground running, which isn't the best way to join a story! I can’t speak to what came before, but his portion concerns a woman who appears to be a fate or a muse, who leaves unintentional havoc wherever she goes. She's ageless and disturbing, and inspiring to the point where people become psychotic, and obsessive about her, trying to track her down long after she's passed through their life.
A struggling band needs money to make a video for one of their recordings, so why not rob a bank? One of them single-handedly brings this off, and on his way home after his successful robbery, he finds a young woman with no clothes, running in the road in the rain - the pouring rain - with only a sheet for modesty (of which she has little). Yes, it rains throughout this entire novel (subtitled 'Pray for Rain') and I'm not sure why, but it seemed strangely refreshing, and appropriate somehow!
He takes the woman back to the old house where the rest of the band is hanging out listlessly, rather festering in their impotence inactivity, and she starts to have an effect on all of them, inspiring the writer to create new and haunting music, and breathing life back into the band's stagnated career, but even as she rejuvenates them, she destroys them. She helps them to rob another bank, and they make that video. It features the woman, but when she dances, all the extras in the video lose all sense of restraint and begin taking off their clothes and indulging carnal desires quite different from the dancing they were hired to perform. Eventually, all that's left of the band is the one guy who robbed the bank in the first place, and the girl leaves him, saying she's no good for him. Now she tells him?
Like I said, I missed the first three volumes, and there are more to come in this series so I can’t speak for all of it, but this one volume was really good. The artwork was excellent, the coloring matching the mood perfectly, the dialog is realistic, and the story is really unnerving, playing out like a road roller, slowly but unstoppably subjugating everything in its path. I recommend it.
