With 2015’s Harrow County, artist Tyler Crook (along with writer Cullen Bunn) managed to set forward a distinctive landmark of American fable. It was a series that is worthy of placing on the shelf next to Gaiman’s American Gods, though it might just as comfortably sit next to American fables like Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown or Southern Gothic literature like Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find.
In last year’s The Lonesome Hunters, Crook set out to tell a new story much less interested in being a period piece, let alone a piece as distinctly tied to location; it was no less interested in crafting a sort of new mythology and distinctive character. Seemingly set in the present, the book follows the accidental adventures of the haunted Howard and the tragic Lupe, an old man and teenager thrust into a partnership against the alarming forces of myth hiding just under the surface of everyday Americana.
The second series, The Lonesome Hunters: The Wolf Child, begins entrenched in that duality: the unreal and the hyper-mundane. A massive wolf beast is wounded by oblivious farmers looking to protect their livestock – a simple worry with supernatural implications.
Howard and Lupe likewise begin our story equally mired in the casual overlapping of two extremes: though there is a talking raven in a cat carrier of their hatchback, the car nonetheless breaks down. It’s an apt metaphor for the narrative world Crook is building, one where the barest veneer covers an overwhelming reality. This is a mundane world separated from wonder by a paper-thin membrane.
Though there are lingering concerns from the first narrative – that raven, for instance – the first issue throws the reader into a new facet of magic; the titular Wolf Child and the wounded beast represent an entirely unguessed wrinkle of the mythological landscape. This suggests and the ever-widening perspective readers might expect from the ongoing Lonesome Hunters narrative, a dense layering of novelty and exploration.
All of this establishes that Crook’s lush and complicated sense of world-building is as astounding and lovely as his artwork, which is rich with character and splashed with beautiful pools of watercolor saturation. Those mundane moments – motel rooms, mechanic bays, and the sterile blankness of a sinister church – feel blanketed in beiges and grays, no less beautiful than the dense greens and vibrant reds in moments of magic – colors made supernatural by the contrast of the natural.
Howard, Lupe, and our slowly extending supporting cast feel wonderfully individualistic, from Lupe’s fresh-faced wonder to the careworn wrinkles carved into Howard’s face. The ravens and wolf feel sharp, somehow sinister even in their appealing animal fluffiness.
The Lonesome Hunters: The Wolf Child #1 feels like a new door being opened, not only in the narrative but for fans of Crook’s prodigious catalog of work. It’s a book that demands to be read, that takes the reader and tugs them along to each wonderful new discovery. There’s no doubt that it will earn itself an esteemed place among the major modern fables.
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