Comic Book Resources
Review of Blood Song: A Silent Ballad
by Michael May
November 22, 2010There’s a right and a wrong way to read Eric Drooker’s Blood Song and I picked the wrong one. In spite of Drooker’s making it extremely clear right there in the title, I tried to read it as a straightforward narrative. Consequently, I spent a lot of time thinking, “That’s not very realistic” and “That character’s behaving very unnaturally” and “That doesn’t make any damn sense.” It wasn’t until I finished it that I thought about the title (and the subtitle: A Silent Ballad--sometimes I’m very dense) and realized that I should have taken it more seriously.
I’m enough of a snob to suggest that you can’t have a song without music, but Blood Song is certainly poetry at least, though it has no words either. Told purely in pictures, it’s the story of what happens to a young girl from a jungle village when a technologically advanced culture invades her island. Each of Drooker’s panels is a beautiful piece of art by itself, mostly in blue and black, but with occasional splashes of stunning, vibrant color. Put together and read, they paint a larger picture and--yes--tell a story, but not one that’s meant to be interpreted literally. It’s one that’s best experienced as a series of feelings: calm, appreciation, fear, shock, anger, despair, and ultimately . . . hope.