Of the Earth #1 // Review
Tabby is from California. She’s getting pulled-over going fifteen miles over the speed limit. She’s on her way back to Solitude. She grew-up there. The sheriff lets her off with a warning. She should drive more carefully. Maybe she’s nervous. Maybe she’s preoccupied. Whatever it is, it’s been a long time since she’s been to Solitude. She’s going to find it a bit difficult to go back home in Of the Earth #1. The writing. team of Chris Condon and Andrew Ehrich open a whole new series with art by Charlie Adlard. Color comes to the page courtesyt of Pip Martin.
Solitude has a population. There are 150 people living there according to the sign on the way into town. Tabby has a bit of a harrowing and disappointing experience on her way in. She narrowly manages to hit her brakes to avoid hitting a dog. It walks a few paces forward and gets run over by a car speeding down the next lane. Some people might see that as an omen. Or just a really bad experience. Suffice it to say it's only the beginning for Tabby. She's going home. She's going to meet her grandmother again.
The writing team does a really good job of establishing the overall format for the serial. The issue opens with a couple of pages out of a book featuring stories that fit into an old southwestern myth of the wildcatter: a person who goes out looking for oil that hasn’t been discovered yet. The fictitious Oilfield Graveyard book serves as a interesting stylistic introduction to a story set in the rural southwest. Tabby's journey is largely without any dialogue. It's a very solitary journey. There's a moodiness that feels very hauntingly vacant. In its own way it's very stylish.
Martin’s colors make the pole atmosphere of the issue, feel very faded and bleached by a dry sun. Adlard soulfully renders the settle nuance of emotions that are playing over Tabby's face. The feeling of desolation is very powerful. Everything feels so very hauntingly empty. There are a lot of wide, establishing shots that give us solid grounding for a story, which is clearly very far from any kind of traditional concept of American civilization. This serves as a really firm grounding for the mood that is going to establish itself over the course of the rest of the series.
Condon states that his inspiration for the series came from Wylis Cooper’s brilliant 1949 one-shot radio drama “The Thing on the Fourble Board.” decades later it stands as easily one of the best audio horror dramas in history. Part of what made that story so haunting was just how very concise it was. Drawing on that for inspiration should prove to be interesting. There's clearly some kind of supernatural horror underneath it all. But for the time being, we're just getting to know, tabby. And whatever it is that she's going to run up against is going to have the potential to be very haunting if the authors can harness the right inspiration from Cooper’s classic.
