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RUNOFF: CHAPTER 1
by Tom Manning
($11.95,
Oddgod Press)
Review by Mark Campos
The small towns of the Pacific Northwest hold a fascination for lovers of the weird. From David Lynch to Steve Willis, writers and artists have imagined the tiny towns full of eccentrics and fools – and the woods nearby teeming with serial killers, Bigfeet, demons, or God.
Runoff takes place in the isolate Washington berg of Ridge, where strange things are happening. Police investigating a quintuple slaying are interrupted by a floating entity that looks like a Japanese child's coin purse. A trucker visits his Buster Bloodvessel-sized brother, who imagines he's a pirate and who has a helper monkey named Siva. People arrive from out of town, but discover they can't leave. And the ghosts...
What it all means isn't explained by the end of this volume, and things promise to get weirder. Manning's imagination swings wide, vividly creating a mystery, and a town to hold it the way a ring holds a gem. His ear for Western Washington-speak is great: "It's raining like no tomorrow and I knew kittens to crickets that it was a good day for fishing." His brushwork is a bit thick, which makes action sequences hard to decipher, but in other scenes he nails the gloominess of a small town in the rain: the panel showing the Chevron station speaks volumes. And he'll unexpectedly draw two pages as a "Bloom County" parody, or include a drunken pirate dance, so you never really know what to expect.
Runoff might not be the slickest comic around, but it is one of the weirdest. Grab a rack of trout beer and a bag of cheez'd snacks, and dig in.
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