Drifter Vol 1- Out Of The Night- Graphic Novel Review- Lost In Space

Writer: Ivan Brandon

Artist: Nic Klein

Publisher: Image Comics

Released: June 2015

Drifter takes the tried and trusted old lost in space idea, throws in a disorientating and deliberately abstract narrative and aims to intrigue the reader, hook him, and keep him there for the duration of the story. Keep reading, keep buying, and we’ll let you know what is going on at the end of the book. You know how it works.

The narrative is focussed on a confused newcomer to a weird sci-fi space place. His ship crashes, things are hazy, he doesn’t know what happened to sections of time, and as the reader follows his tale it’s clear that this confusion is meant to titillate, to get you to speculate about what has happened, and what is now currently happening. Annoyed or intrigued? It’s a fine line, and the book often tumbles over into the annoying category. 

A feeling of cool detachment permeates the book, and the dialogue often reads as fragments of drunken poetry, of a writer more interested in saying something that sounds good, rather than something that is going to help the reader understand his narrative. It’s a reader unfriendly book, it’s going to do what it wants, and if you can make something out of it, then good luck with that. There’s a story here, but writer Ivan Brandon is not going to make it easy for you.

The characters are not as strange as they first appear. They are neoliberal standards, the kind of characters that you always see in contemporary comic books. There’s the punk haired tough teen girl who acts like a man. There’s the crazed Christian (It’s always a crazed Christian, never a crazed Jew or Muslim). There’s the weirdly tough and independent adolescent girl, a standard now, as kids are being taught to accept a new world order where Daddy will no longer have a role. She follows a reluctant father figure, a stand-in for the absent father choosing to run away from his children, a worryingly consistent narrative aspect of our times, at least in works of fiction. Your father has abandoned you kids, now run into the loving arms of Big Daddy State. 

The main protagonist is adrift. A man alone dumped onto a strange new world. I found no substance to him. He misses his girlfriend, doesn’t smile, and lashes out with violence, but his main role is to serve the story, and to unravel the mystery behind the narrative. He’s a blank page, and it’s hard to empathise with a blank page.

Drifter Vol. 1- Out of the Night has a lot of intrigue cool, but it’s dense, trying to be something more than it is by hiding the narrative within hazy narration and character dialogue and memory loss scenarios in the plot-line. It irritated me. There was a lot of cleverness going on, but not a lot of insight or narrative clarity. I like a good story, well told, not a confusing one, abstractly told. 

There was something annoyingly student art project about it. It’s trying to be clever, trying to impress, when all I really wanted was a good story that I could jump into and enjoy. The story is a tease, and I get suspicious about these kinds of stories. They tease, and tease and tease, stringing you on for as long as possible, and then when they finally do reveal what it was all about, it’s not very exciting, revelatory or revolutionary anyway. It’s just another book, and now you have 25 issues of it, 25 issues where you kept reading on, hoping for an answer, and when it finally comes, you find that it wasn’t worth all the time (and money) spent investing in it anyway.  

I got this book for just over a fiver, and I read it all in just over twenty minutes, so I don’t feel conned by it. I feel a bit confused, but that’s the point of the book. It wants to keep you confused so you’ll keep on buying it. I won’t be doing that. There’s not enough here for me to invest in. The characters are either too familiar (in a fictional sense) or not developed enough for me to care about them. It has a cool factor about it, but that’s a huge turn-off for me these days.

I’m starting to despise cool. Cool is for the young. I’m past caring about cool. I have no use for it anymore. The youthful obsession and deception of cool no longer appeals. Drifter is okay. It’s a book that attempts to intrigue and have the reader follow along in hopes of a bombshell explanation at the end of the narrative. It doesn’t quite work for me, but I didn’t hate it.

Rating: 6/10 (Obtuse sci-fi book that is not quite as intriguing as it wants to be)