Trailers

So I’m supposed to be guest-posting here only occasionally, and mainly about comics. Here's the comics part, anyway.

I was browsing to kill time in St. Mark’s Comics before a showing of, you guessed it, Brokeback Mountain, and the clerk recommended this:



I’ve been a little annoyed with comics lately: all my favorite writers are making their money putting out endless reissues of their old stuff, while not doing much new, and the stuff I pick up by new writers has been more miss than hit. I don’t even bother anymore with the black-and-white drawings of some twentysomething loser and his friends bumming around a mid-sized city.

I bought Trailers on the clerk’s recommendation for three reasons:
1) The kid is bloody and holding a shovel on the cover. There’s no way he works in a Kinko’s.
2) The blurb on the back cover says his mom killed a guy and made him bury the body.
3) The thing was shrink-wrapped, so I couldn’t find out anything else.

Most likely I wouldn’t have bought it if I had been able to open it, since the drawing style isn’t all that interesting. (I can’t draw at all, mind you. I just criticize.) And that would have been a shame, because the story is interesting enough, the first comic version of Southern Gothic I’ve seen. (I think Southern Gothic is the right description for a book where everyone lives in a trailer park in some unidentified Southern town, and the dog keeps digging up pieces of the dead body and chewing on them. And the mom is a junkie whore.) Doesn’t totally work at the end, but it’s better than a lot of crap.

Previews below: