I love my job here at Shock. I love getting to see movies and read comics for free and then writing about how awesome or terrible they are, I’m really lucky in that regard. I’m not the first one to tell you this, and you might have already figured this out for yourself, but there’s a lot of repetition in the horror genre. I can’t even remember how many zombie and vampire comic books I’ve written about over the past few months, and not to mention how many I’m reading that I don’t write about. In that regard, it is always nice to get a genre book that is different, and in this case I do mean different.
Dominique Laveau Voodoo Child is one of the most original and cool comics I’ve read in some time. It, of course, is about the life of Dominique Laveau a descendent of the infamous New Orleans Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau (if you couldn’t make the connection), and the very bizarre adventure she’s about to have in New Orleans a mere 4 months after Hurricane Katrina. The book is written by Selwyn Seyfu Hinds with pencils by Deny’s Cowan.
This comic takes no prisoners. When it starts, it’s going and it doesn’t care if you’re ready or not. I like that in a book. You don’t have to hold my hand and show me everything, I’m an adult, reading a Vertigo comic, I know how to read, lets get to the story post haste. Like any good first issue it does a good job of introducing the protagonist and all of her supporting characters, while still producing questions that we as readers want answered, and won’t get in this issue alone. Though it does make me a little apprehensive about the future in that there isn’t a lot of time put into the supporting characters. Now I understand that this is indeed Dominique’s story, but she can’t go on her journey alone, especially if the purpose of everyone around her is just cannon fodder.
One thing that I really like about this book so far is that I have no idea who the bad guy is after reading this. There are a few possibilities of who it is, but is it one of them? Is it all of them? I’m not sure, and that’s an exciting place to take a story, especially a serialized one. But as far as potential bad guys are concerned, there’s a lot of cool things in this book. Giant monsters, other worldly deities, hallucinations, maybe ghosts. The variety of adversaries and the potential threat they pose serves as a great back bone for this series.
At first I wasn’t too crazy about the art in this book. My initial thought before I wrote this review was that all the normal stuff wasn’t the interesting to look at, well luckily I went back and re-read the issue because in reality there’s not a lot of normal in this book. I guess the proper modification of that is that I didn’t care for the panels without much action, like the close up of someone’s face when they’re talking, or if someone is walking down the street, while very good art, don’t cause the same stirring reaction I get from the rest of the book. Which in actuality isn’t a good complain considering so very few mundane things happen in this book because A. the story never slows down enough to lose your attention, and B. the art is always gripping and interesting. So, in summary, the art is fabulous and keeps your attention to the page almost more than the story.
This marks the third new series that Vertigo has started this month, and it’s their third home run. I’m eagerly awaiting another issue, not only to drool over Denys Cowan’s art, but so I can know what the hell is going to happen next.
