Ivan Brandon has been waiting quite some time for his due. For years, he’s been saddled with various books that were ill-fated from the start, from tie-in miniseries like Final Crisis Aftermath: Escape and X-Men: Nation X to a couple of “big chance” books like the New 52’s Men of War that unfortunately went nowhere. I’ve always been impressed by the things I’ve read from him (the Home Invasion mini he wrote was the most interesting part of the Secret Invasion crossover for me), and so when I saw he had a new sci-fi western emerging from the Image buzz machine with his Viking co-conspirator Nic Klein, I was interested to say the least.
Drifter is the story of a man who crash-lands on a backwater planet. Why did he crash? Where was he going? These are not questions the book is interested in answering quite yet. What we have so far is a book that’s light on plot, minimalist on character, but huge on atmosphere and worldbuilding, and those are good things to have right out of the gate. Honestly, if today’s comic market has taught creators anything, it’s that characterization only has to exist within the first arc, and plot can wait till the 2nd TPB in many cases. Only time will tell if Drifter will wait that long to give us an actual story to go along with all the mood, but for the moment, I’m more than willing to stick it out and see, mostly because while the characters haven’t hooked me, the atmosphere and overall voice of the book most definitely have.
Brandon studied under David Mazzucchelli, (who famously worked with Frank Miller on Daredevil: Born Again and Batman: Year One) and has worked extensively with both Goran Parlov and Eduardo Risso (both of whom had their big breaks working with Garth Ennis). With Drifter, Brandon isn’t so much channeling those that he’s directly worked with, so much as he is the legendary tough guys of comicdom that are the friends of his friends. The dialogue in this book is eerily reminiscent of pre-YY-chromosome-crazytown Frank Miller, and to an extent some of Garth Ennis’ tamer work (Tommy Monaghan wouldn’t seem at all out-of-place in this story). That’s not to say that it always works (the exchange between the marshal and her boyfriend is pretty cringe-inducing), but mostly it fits the setting rather than seeming silly or over-the-top.
And what a setting! Nic Klein’s artwork is absolutely fabulous. He’s created a world that’s one part LV-426, one part Tattoine, and two parts New Mexico steppes, and while that doesn’t sound like the prettiest thing you’ll ever see, the landscapes in this book are some of the coolest I’ve seen in quite some time, and Klein’s use of color and shadows gives you a very solid sense of place in all the outdoor scenes. The indoor scenes are a bit more homogenous, all shadows and indistinct backgrounds to focus on the characters, but the worldbuilding more than makes up for it. I don’t really know who any of these people are yet, but there’s a lot of room for interesting stories as we learn more about them, and like any good sci-fi story, there’s a great central mystery that gives the issue room to comfortably hang itself out over a cliff.
This book may not be for everybody. The characters are, thus far, fairly predictable, and the plot would be too, if there were enough of it to really point in any given direction. But the art is gorgeous, and there is definitely a sense that the story’s going somewhere, it may just take a little while. Plus, I’m a sucker for tough-guy sci-fi stories. That alone will keep me reading for a couple of arcs.