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Weing, Drew – Set to Sea
Huzzah for some of the crew from Athens getting a book published by Fantagraphics! I’ve made it to a couple of FLUKE’s over the years (both times during a rare ice/snow storm in Georgia), and there’s all kinds of talent floating around down there. The credits in this book revealed that Drew is married to Eleanor Davis, and just look up her name on this site to find some fantastic comics. If those two have kids they’re sure to have artistically gifted mutants, and I mean that in the best possible “X-Men” sense and not the horribly deformed sense. Give them a pen and paper as soon as they’re able to grip things, that’s what I’m inartfully trying to say. When I picked this up and flipped through it at the library I wasn’t sure what to expect, as it’s not all that big and all the pages only have one big panel. Any fears I may have had were unfounded, as Drew is able to do a lot with those “restrictions.” This is the story of a meandering lug of a poet, a guy who skips out on his bills and mostly just wants to read and sleep. He is seen sleeping on the dock and is taken captive to be part of a ship’s crew. The poor guy wakes up when they’ve already set sail so he’s kind of stuck with it, and he quickly gets to see what those poems of the sea he was trying to write were really about. Pirates attack the ship, he is singled out as the biggest of the defenders and attacked, which leads to some serious rage and a saving of the day. From there Drew uses the possibilities of the medium to perfection, telling the life story of the guy page by page, somehow pulling the impression of a richly lived life through scattered moments. And even the “only one panel per page” isn’t a fair cause for complaint, as he manages to tell a little story on every one of them with his attention to detail while often avoiding those pesky “words.” I have no idea if this book will catch on, as it often takes somebody a few graphic novels to really get the attention of the small press comics world, but the man is well on his way with this gem. And if anybody in the comics publishing world pays the slightest bit of attention to this website of mine, you might want to give his wife a call about putting out a graphic novel too… $17
