The Lonesome Hunters: The Wolf Child #2 // Review
Frank isn’t sure that it’s even legal to kill wolves. Maybe they’re protected or something. It doesn’t matter, though. You lose cows the way one of the locals did. You don’t question it. (Ted isn’t even sure that it could have BEEN a wolf. It’s not like this is Montana or anything.) The thing tore through the cows, though... biggest claw marks you’ve ever seen. Things are getting dangerous in The Lonesome Hunters: The Wolf Child #2. Writer/artist Tyler Crook continues a story of small-town horror slinking along the edges of the highway in a well-crafted piece of American drama.
Lupe went out to get a soda from the vending machine. Howard was in a hell of a panic about it. The locals would have thought that he might have been overreacting, but given the size of the thing that attacked those cows, they can certainly understand. It’s really, really dangerous to be walking around alone at night. The thing is...Lupe saw something out there, and she didn’t want to talk about it with all the strangers around. It’s not like they didn’t notice THAT. Clearly, these people from out of town are up to something...
Crook glides the horror drama through a well-paced story that beats with the pulse of small-town midwestern America. There’s a horror that’s resting along the edges of everything that seems to be mixing with the interpersonal dramas of so many people in and around the immediate area. The complexity of relations between Lupe and Howard fain some further gravity in the presence of a large predator. Lupe is an earthbound hero who is looking to help something that’s in pain. That’s not the type of heroism that often makes it into monster-based horror. It’s a touching and emotionally engaging conflict.
Crook handles the visual reality of the drama with a tender nuance that seems to respect the complexity of nearly every character on the page. There are intricate articulations of emotion flowing between Howard and Lupe. There’s a lot that goes unspoken in the concern between the two of them. As a writer, Crook hands many of the emotional dynamics of the story to himself as an artist. There is so much that passes between characters between lines of dialogue that make The Wolf Child one of the more subtly dramatic titles on the comics rack today.
Overall, Crook’s pacing seems to be the central appeal of the series. It’s beginning to become apparent over the course of the series that Cook’s story might have taken the space of a single issue written by a less inspired writer. The fact that Crook can keep things interesting at a very low metabolism is quite an achievement in and of itself. The fact that there’s as much going on as there is, even WITH the slow pacing of the series,...that’s its own kind of genius. Precisely where it is that Crook’s going with the series might become a bit of a problem over time, but the first two issues of the series are beautiful.
