Dust to Dust #2 // Review
She’s taking pictures of a couple of boys playing. Tells them she doesn’t want them to smile. Just play like it’s any other day in the dustbowl. Maybe she wants to capture something real for history. Or maybe she just needs to get out of the house. Whatever it is, there’s danger. A dust storm is coming in Dust to Dust #2. The writing team of. J.G. Jones and Phil Bram continue their historical drama with Jones’ art. It’s a richly-textured dramatic ensemble work that feels firmly rooted in history. There’s a depth of character that animates the page amidst the gneral sense of fatigue that resonates through the period of the setting.
Elsewhere there’s a girl who is going walking with her doll. She’s just passed the bones of some kind of hoofed quadruped. (Probably a horse.) Off in the distance a crow is cawing. There’s a tree out there. No foliage on it. Just a single, lone figure is hanging by his neck from a rope on that tree. The girl is silent. Somewhere in the depths of her mind she’s seeing a figure on horseback. Someone out of Edgar Rice Burroughs. A green Martian is coming to save her.
Bram and Jones keep everything firmly rooted in reality while occasional flights of dark fancy move across the page. There's a lot going on in and around the ensemble. A lot of interesting fluctuations in expectation of the type of story that would be going on in the dustbowl. It's quite a journey from one cover to another in the second issue in the series. Just the same as it was in the first. There's a lot of moodiness that seems to animate and resonate off the page in Waze that don't necessarily engage verbally with the reader. Even when there are long stretches of conversation, it's not necessarily what it's being said so much is the setting in which it's being said that really speaks, the language of the series.
The black-and-white sepia of the action continues to be one of the strongest characters in the series. Nearly every panel in the issue feels like it could have been an old photograph. Something faded. Something that might've been exposed on a glass plate or something like that. Some of the more powerful moments in the issue seem to come like something out of a dream, though. Is not to say that the more earthbound dramatic elements aren't every bit as compelling.
Bram and Jones are taking their time with the rendering of the ensemble of characters. This involves quite a bit of patience. There is doubtlessly quite a lot going on in and around the edges of all the characters in the ensemble that is going to be revealed in time. But it is going to take a long time. They are perfectly satisfied with long stretches of Moody silence and carefully rendered bits of dramatic action, which slowly play out on the page. It's very compelling and haunting stuff.
