The Rocket

Review of Flood! A Novel in Pictures

by Patrick Barber

Fall 1993

An exhaustively stunning "novel" that brings new meaning to the work of graphic storytelling. Flood! consists of two stories, both set in Manhattan, both free of dialogue, carried only by the mighty hand of Drooker's scratchboard drawings.

The first story, Home, drags an unwilling character rapidly through a gradual collapse of his life--in the first frame, he awakes to go to work and in the last he stares down a long subway entrance that he will be looking at for a long, long time, having lost his job and home, stuck out on the street. The depth and movement of the drawing is almost hard to keep up with, as if everything's rushing by in a blur. Movement is hyper-exaggerated with bright sprays of light and mussled edges, and Drooker uses the eye's frames-per-page instinct like a rifle, squeezing the frames into tinier and tinier grids and then exploding into a double-page spread. It's an interactive reading experience that moves on several narrative levels. The final passage in Home is a liquid dreamscape, dashing through the neolithic secret underground tribalism of New York City, a subway tunnel scratched with petroglyphs and fiery caverns roaring with the heat and humanity of a dancing ritual. Just as quickly we're back in reality, staring down the gullet of a police dog, and back in Manhattan.

Flood! moves similarly, adding the judicious use of blue to the black-and-white page. The story here is of a flood that sinks New York, with a subtext of several other stories as drawn by the main character, a cartoonist. The imagery moves from Inuit legend to carnival daze to nightmarish visions of violence in an onslaught of rapidly connected flashes, until finally all is washed away in a neo-Biblical swipe.

Drooker has an unsure obsession with New York City that reaches for its deepest mass humanity while being quashed by consumerism and the sheer bulk and impossibility of urban madness and impending death. An apocalyptic mysticism, manic and complete, visual rants that never lose their feverish track. Every detail is held in tight focus. From each meticulous frame to the beautiful printing job, to the little umbrella guy in the grainy UPC code on the back, Flood! is an unfetteringly brilliant debut.