Red Roots #2 // Review
There’s a guy dying in the desert. A couple of predators see him and they think what any animal in their position might think: an easy meal. Of course...he puts up one hell of a fight before they nearly kill him. Would have been able to do so too if it weren’t for the big guy who comes to their rescue at the last moment. It’s going to be a rough journey in Red Roots #2. Writer/artist Lorenzo De Felici continues an interesting adventure into dark fantasy that still seems to be settling-down into the rhythm and pulse of its own narrative.
The big guy explains to the near-corpse of the man that he would have come-in to save him sooner, but he was interested in seeing how the conflict with the desert dogs was going to play-out. He was genuinely impressed by how well the nearly dead guy managed to defend himself, so he decided to give him a hand. The gentleman in question is inhumanly huge. He’s got a short mohawk. And he’s singing The Talking Heads “Life During Wartime” as he brings the nearly dead guy back to some kind of civilization.
The big guy’s name is Grit. De Felici pushed the narrative into the heavier end of fantasy with clever precision. All too often there's way too much exposition and backstory that gets lowered into a narrative early in a series like this. De Felici drops the readers right into the heart of his story without really a whole lot of explanation. There's that sense of entering an alien world that's vaguely familiar. It's one of the best techniques for bringing a reader into a world of fantasy. It all seems so appealing really weird that you just kind of want to exist a bear with the characters.
The appealing weirdness of the story does extent into De Felici’s hard work, which feels like it is drawing around the edges of history and fantasy at the same time. Elements and aspects of it feel like they might've come out of the sketchbook of someone like Frank Frazetta, but they've got a firm grounding in a kind of historical reality that feels remarkably compelling. Above all, the central drama of the story is brought to the page in a way that makes the strange and foreign feeling of the world feel warm and welcoming.
De Felici nails, the second issue almost perfectly. It's really just a matter of expanding the world from here. Now that the reader is given of perspective on one of these that's going on in the course of the series, rest of the issues can't continue to focus on the momentum of the action at the heart of the drama. So long as De Felici is able to maintain the overall rhythm and momentum that he's established and the first couple of issues, all should be quite well with respect to that. The second issue speaks to a very promising series.
