Moonshine Bigfoot #1 // Review
He’s a bigfoot. She’s a hippie. It’s a cryptozoological action comedy road trip written by Mike Marlow and Zach Howard (who is also the inker.) Artist Steve Ellis frames the over-the-top comic action for the page. Color resonated through the road trip courtesy of Nelson Daniel. It’s the first issue of Moonshine Bigfoot. It’s an intersting and enjoyable opener for what will hopefully be a long-running series. The creative team does a really good job of putting everything together in the big opener. It’s a distinctly comic contemporary horror universe that Marlow and Howard are coaxing onto the page. It’s fun stuff.
It’s the summer of 1981. Amethyst is painting her toenails as the sasquatch slams on the gas. They’re shooting through Buzzard County, Georgia. There are few squad cars shooting out after them with sirens blazing. They’re not worried too much about it, though. They’re both getting hungry and thinking about their next meal. Moonshine Bigfoot and Amethyst don’t have a whole lot to worry about with the police, though. They’re racing around in a hot rod Mustang. The police couldn’t hope to catch-up. There ARE others out there, though.
There’s a group of bigfoot hunters on his trail and a shadowy figure who seems to have a great deal of experience...and a few cryptids in his truck as well...
Marlow and Howard take the basic format of The Dukes of Hazzard and admirably modify it. The cryptozoic comedy element might seem like a strange choice, but it feels like a perfect fit for Marlow and Howard. The two writers hit the opening page running and keep the action moving straight through to the end of the opening issue. the various diverse elements racing across the highway feels deliciously failiar to the era of the story. There are shades of Cannonball Run in the opening issue as well.
The artwork is absolutely gorgeous. Ellis slams the action on the page with a sharp sense of speed and kinetics. When the chase needs to feel fast, Ellis can make it feel like a white knuckle ride across the interstate. There’s a deeply atmospheric sense of detail that Howard does a brilliant job of rendering. Some of the detail seem ridiculously meticulous in a way that feels deliciously overwhelming in more than one place.
When the action settles down at issue’s end, Howard and Ellis really lay into the atmosphere. The big crowd shot at the bar is a lot of fun...deftly drawing on pop cultural imagery from the early 1980s in a style very much inspired by comic book and graphic artists of the early 1980s. It’s impressive stuff. It’s pretty rare that a retro comic book manages to nail an era quite as well as the first issue of Moonshine Bigfoot. Granted...the art IS a lot more detailed than most of mainstream comic books managed to be back then and Daniels’ coloring work is WAY ahead of what would have been possible on the page back then, but it’s an impressive tribute to an earlier era of action comedy.
