Broken Frontier

Sean is sent to stay with his aunt and uncle, and soon bears witness to the horrifying true story of the oldest married couple ever to walk Missouri’s death row.

Family Bones is an intriguing project by ambitious new publisher King Tractor Press. From the offset the story seems to be a unique one – not just another sketchy profile of an obsessed, introverted sociopath (ala Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), nor is it an overly cheeky attempt to glorify the reclusive intellect of fictional masterminds like Hannibal Lector. The tale is instead evocative of a very quiet, very subdued Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with the gritty realism of the first movie edged with faint touches of the zaniness found in its sequels. Our main character, Sean, is – by a succession of familial evasions – shrugged off and placed into the tender care of his distant Aunt Faye and Uncle Ray who live within the boondocks of Missouri farmland. Upon Sean’s arrival, and without a single panel of hesitation, the events immediately swoop into high tension with Uncle Ray’s erratic, hillbilly posturing and Aunt Faye’s impossibly oblivious, false sugariness. Sean is demoralized and intimidated into working the fields, forced to carry out painstaking, inexplicable labor. For the following night and day, this continues, and the rebellious Sean is broken piece by piece, inevitably humiliated.

Shawn Granger’s scripting for Family Bones is sparse, causing the comic to read like a cross between a short student film script and an underground silent strip. On one side of the does-it-work see-saw, this allows for a quiet, effusive eeriness to permeate the work; a thicker atmosphere of off-kilter, barely suppressed lunacy. Basically, the less said, the more the reader has to mull over and fret. But weighing down the opposite end a bit too heavily, the story lacks richness, a fullness of character and event due to the complete dearth of any true narration or interactive development of plot and characterization. This is a fault that especially hinders the flow of the story at transition points; from setting to setting and unspoken time lapses. When Sean is moved from his mother to his grandmother and then finally to his aunt and uncle, the switch off is literally from one panel to another with no narrative to tell the reader what has changed or why; and sadly the art does not give an honest enough storytelling clarity for such a word-lite tale to work.

And that effortlessly brings me (see? Transition, people! Transition!) to the artwork of Orlando Baez. The artist’s work holds a liquid sensibility that does faithfully contribute to the unfettered madness that crawls throughout the settings and their inhabitants. The inherent danger of Uncle Ray and Aunt Faye is felt more than seen, understood more than spoken, and Baez’s style is animated with this very uncertain edginess (even though Ray does bluster his way violently through the events of this first chapter, there’s a greater sense of threat here than that evoked by the ignorant, angry rants that he sermons, and Baez smoothly suggests this). Though even here the final product is a two-sided affair – this same loose artistic technique of Baez’s could easily be seen as unpolished and unrefined. The style is perhaps too unfinished and may be read as wielding an absolute absence of solid aesthetic rather than a fully fleshed, truly effectual one. Regardless, as interesting as it may be to see how potential readers respond to Baez, FB has been announced as having an astoundingly diverse artistic lineup: a different art team for every single issue! Once again, this may be received as either a beguiling or repellant notion, though I personally think the story may just up and gel with such a wild assortment of visual élan.

King Tractor Press has certainly offered up some attractive looking new series, all of which will be hitting the shelves later this year. Reviews so far have been leaning towards the idea that potential is there, though the work itself is still a bit coarse and could use an industrial sander or two. As with anything containing proscribed entertainment value, the final verdict will be varied and contradicting, but I do, in Family Bones, see the above mentioned, budding possibility of a small yet strong, favorable new comic company coming through with a steady stream of well-conceived projects. The work is rough, but I for one enjoyed this unevenness within FB #1. If King Tractor can mobilize and produce more cohesive, verbally and visually demonstrative single issues, they could well be a steady and powerful new company within the comic book field.

Check out all King Tractor Press products at http://www.kingtractorfilms.com/press.html