Bayou Vol. 1 & 2

Last week I read Unwritten Vol 1-2, which is the beginning of what appears to be one of the great Vertigo series.  The past few weeks I’ve been talking about really mainstream books so this week it’s time to return to the roots of the post.  I needed to read something that a lot of other people hadn’t read.  Or hadn’t read in print at least, so this week I read Bayou Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, written and illustrated by Jeremy Love, published by DC/Zuda.

Bayou was part of DC’s Zuda experiment, which created web comics from 2007-10.  If the webcomic was popular enough, as voted on by readers, the stories would then be printed in actual comic book form.  Jeremy Love’s Bayou was the first Zuda Comic to be printed (June 2009).

Set in 1933 Mississippi, Lee is a black sharecropper’s daughter whose mother left her and her father.  Against her father’s wishes, she’s friends with the white land owners daughter.  When the white girl loses a family locket in the swamp, it sets off a chain of events that causes Lee’s father to go to jail and the local white population to start demanding justice, Lee must travel under the cypress tree in the bog into a new world full of interesting characters and strange events in order to save here father.

The best way to describe this book is to think of Alice in Wonderland in the deep south at the height of Jim Crow.  Love does a great job of creating tension and a true sense of dread within the story.  When Lee is playing with a little white girl you can’t help but wonder what will go wrong.  When Lee’s father is taken to jail you can’t help but wonder how far off is the lynch mob.  And, even though all these incidents are clichés and you know they are coming, Love does such a great job developing the characters that you can’t help but get sucked in.

Love also does a great job of creating an alternate, southern style wonderland with Br’er Rabbit instead of the White Rabbit and other famous substitutions.  But, I think what sold it for me is that the entire Wonderland is tainted by Jim Crow and the violence associated with it.  It brings a very real danger to the time that Lee spends there which further heightens the tension.

Love’s art is also incredible good.  He has a solid sense of composition and especially perspective.  When in “Wonderland,” Lee encounters many smaller animals like Rabbit, and larger people like Bayou the giant.  Creating layouts and panel design to keep three very different sized characters all together is difficult work.  But Love does it with great success. 

My only complaint is that the story isn’t done.  I am hoping that a third book is issued that will give me a conclusion, but even if it doesn’t it’s a mystical ride getting there.  If you want a book that really plays with your expectations and creates something new, then this is the book for you.

- David Lee