Blood Song by Eric Drooker

Fabulous art, disappointing story
Blood Song is a wordless novel by Eric Drooker, first published in 2002. The book is composed of illustrations created using a combination of scratchboard and watercolor media. The pictures are composed almost entirely in black, white, and shades of bluish gray, with the exception of occasional touches of color added for emphasis—a yellow butterfly, a green bird, a red drop of blood. The art in this book is absolutely beautiful! Each panel is suitable for framing. In this book Drooker displays a more mature, refined, and fluid style than the jagged, raw imagery of his 1992 graphic novel Flood! That’s not to say that either style is better; both books stand as contemporary masterpieces of graphic art.

Unfortunately the storytelling of Blood Song doesn’t meet the same standard as the art. The beginning of the book is strikingly similar to Laurence Hyde’s excellent wordless novel of 1951, Southern Cross. Drooker depicts a rural village in what appears to be southeast Asia. Here a young woman lives out an idyllic existence with her family and her faithful dog. While out fetching water one day, her paradise is invaded by a military force that looks an awful lot like Americans. The girl and her dog flee, embarking on a journey that will take them far away from their homeland. About nine out of ten images in the book depict the girl on her way to some place. Only about one in ten show what happens when she actually gets somewhere. The result is a book loaded with beautiful images but possessing little literary content. While Flood! contained some ambiguity in its narrative, allowing for varied interpretations, Blood Song is a very linear and straightforward story. Drooker seems to be striving for the allegorical feel of a modern-day fairy tale, but even fairy tales require more depth than one finds here. It doesn’t help that the heroine here is a literal babe-in-the-woods innocent, creating a good vs. evil dichotomy that is as absolute as black and white. Drooker’s apparent assertion that all cops, all soldiers, all figures of authority are evil comes across as immature. In Flood! Drooker handled his characters and plot with much more subtletly and nuance. Blood Song, though stunning to look at, leaves the reader wanting more.
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Flood! A Novel in Pictures by Eric Drooker

Standing on the shoulders of giants
Flood! is a wordless novel composed of scratchboard illustrations by artist Eric Drooker. It continues the rich but little-known tradition of pictorial literature best exemplified by the works of expressionistic woodcut artists Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward. That Drooker has thoroughly studied the work of these great masters of the past is quite obvious. At times the homage is a little too faithful, as there are scenes here that seem as if they were lifted directly out of Ward’s Wild Pilgrimage or Madman’s Drum. Drooker makes the art form his own, however, by filtering these historic influences through the visual language of the underground comics movement that originated in the 1960s. The resulting concoction is a truly beautiful and profound work of graphic storytelling.

Though subtitled “A Novel in Pictures,” it’s unclear whether the three parts of Flood! are intended to be chapters in a novel or rather three self-contained short stories. Each features a lone male protagonist who wanders through a labyrinthine metropolis. As in the works of Ward and Masereel, this representative man struggles to survive in his oppressive urban environment, along the way encountering the hazards of poverty, unemployment, violence, incarceration, love, and lots and lots of rain. Despite the hardships, the city is not without its moments of sublime beauty. The book starts out rather gritty and realistic, then becomes more and more fanciful and whimsical—incorporating dream sequences and hallucinations—all along ambitiously broadening its scope until its subject matter encompasses no less than the end of the world itself. Both the artwork and the narrative are loaded with hidden treasures, revealing new discoveries with each rereading. Drooker is to be commended for resurrecting this lost art form and shaping it with his own unique vision. Those who appreciate skillfully crafted graphic art, either vintage or contemporary, will find much to enjoy in this latter-day classic.
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