Tramps of the Apocalypse #2 // Review
There’s a guy in the trunk of the car. He’s asking to be let out. It might not be the best idea, but they’re going to have to get him into a more comfortable space so he can answer a few questions in Tramps of the Apocalypse #2. Writer/artist Alice Darrow continues an enjoyably weird sci-fi comedy with colorist Hugo Blanc. Though it’s clearly echoing anxieties that move through a great many topics, Darrow is actually working on a ery small canvas with just a few characters who are all refreshingly absurd in different ways. It’s a lot of fun.
The ladies are driving around the wasteland in an old Volkswagen bug. There’s. reasonably menacing guy who is folowing them around...on bicycle. He’s wearing a black leather S&M-style outfit and he’s carrying some pretty serious armaments. No telling how it is that he’s able to catch-up with them, but when he does, things get pretty dangerous for everyone involved. If the ladies are going to be able to get out of their predicament with the pursuer, they’re going to have to think fast. They’re going to have to reach for an aerosol can of virility musk. Anything could happen.
Darrow is having fun with post-apocalyptic adventure tropes. The tendency with indie weirdness is to go for the very, very weird. The drama tends to get lost in the weirdness, though. As odd as Darrow’s story is...there’s still enough of a sense of menaxe about everything for it all to be grounded in a solid sense of drama. That allows the werirdness to be firly planted in a compelling story that still happens to include things like badass bicycles, weird cults and aerosol virility. It’s strange stuff, but it’s a lot of fun because there’s some sense of coherence about hte background.
The artwork is stiff and sticky, but Darrow keeps it fun by virtue of perspective. The primitive silliness of the artwork might lack a great deal of finesse, but Darrow has a solid grasp of movement, motion, emotion and intensity that keep it all moving from cover to cover. THe world that Darrow is rendering might not be anywhere near as compelling if the artwork was more traditionally slick. Darrow’s personality can be strongly felt in every panel. Her personality drives the narrative with such clever coolness. If it was anything else, it just wouldn’t by Darrow.
The basic substance of the issue is a single encounter. There’s a great deal of patience in that kind of pacing. It means that Darrow’s world has an opportunity to play-out at slow speed in a way that could make for a delightfully long-run post-apocalyptic satire. ALl to often this sort of thing tries to define WAY too much too early on and it just feels like an excercise in world-building. Darrow does an excellent job of holding-back on the epxosition and simply allowing the story to reveal it in time.
