November 7, 2002
You can breeze through Blood Song's 300 pages in a matter of minutes, if you wish. Eric Drooker, a veteran of the political comics anthology World War 3 Illustrated, as well as numerous magazine and album covers, has always drawn inspiration from the bold simplicity of woodcut art, and Blood Song is his simplest, and boldest, work to date. Similar in form to its predecessor, Flood!, Blood Song begins and ends in the cosmos, and while the places it touches down in between might bear resemblances to Southeast Asia and New York City, the story's outlines are pure fable. A woman in white flees her jungle home after her husband is killed by military thugs, then traverses the ocean in a tiny rowboat, only to find the new world no better than the one she left behind. Drooker's sharp black-and-white drawings take on shadings of soft blue, with occasional bursts of bright color; scenes often spread across both pages, the black border between them giving the tale a storybook feel. To the extent that Drooker's settings are recognizable, the tale seems didactic, a schematic screed against caricatured men with guns. But there are moments, and plenty of them, when the tale is pure poetry, when it soars like the butterfly that escapes the city in the story's closing pages.