October, 2002
Eric Drooker's graphic novel is about as straightforward as you can get for a book without words. First, there's the whole galaxy, then Earth, then there's a fish, which gets caught by a peasant who lives in a thatch hut with his wife and daughter. While the daughter is out getting water, thuggish soldiers with machine guns attack her village. Pursued, she runs through the forest, finds a boat and flees across the ocean to a Fritz Langian American metropolis. Here, she hooks up with a saxophone player, who eventually gets thrown in the slammer for belting out True Shit on street corners, which The Man hates. The girl is left to have the sax player's baby on a rooftop all alone in the middle of winter, followed by one final wide shot of outer space.
Blood Song is all about the meaningless cacophony that surrounds a culture after it's been forcibly tracheotomized. What's left of the original signal is indiscernible as it's buried in noise. Just like the girl, our culture stepped out for a minute, came back and found itself under attack, but with empty slogans and logos.
Herein lies the point of Drooker's story. It's not just some village out in the killing fields that's getting silenced; it's happening everywhere. The art imparts a sense of urgency to this message, with dramatic swaths of ink equally capable of implying the movement of life or the stillness of death. The deliberate, imposing blackness is set in contrast to the washed-out, ethereal colors that serve to further heighten the tension.