Philadelphia Weekly
Review of Blood Song: A Silent Ballad
by Liz Spikol
October 2002The best graphic novels--stripped of writerly artifice and marketing strategies --employ a seemingly innocent technique to reveal truths behind important stories, like Art Spiegelman's Holocaust chronicle Maus or Will Eisner's books about immigrant life in 1930s New York. Now comes the newest from Eric Drooker, an activist/ illustrator who gives us a graphic novel without one of the genre's key elements: words. In what he calls "a silent ballad," Drooker's incredible images--drawn in a haunting spectrum of blues, whites, grays and blacks--tell the story of a young girl who lives a seemingly idyllic life in an unspecified island nation (Vietnam?). When soldiers from another unspecified country (the U.S.?) come and destroy her village, she and her dog are forced to flee. Her journey is suspenseful and compelling, and it's amazing how much Drooker manages to convey by putting that eternal writing rule ("show, don't tell") into action. As the girl's journey twists and turns, you find yourself flipping the pages with urgency. But when you're done with the story, you can go back and appreciate the richness of Drooker's artwork and the remarkable unspooling of a wordless narrative.