writer: Justin Jordan / artist: Matteo Scalera
If you are a comic book fan and you often invest in the big crossover battles of a Geoff Johns style or the long game that is a John Hickman book, its refreshing to get a self-contained minimal frills comic every once in a while. Enter Dead Body Road. The premise is simple and straight forward: a bank robbery goes down and things get messy. A cop is killed during the heist and her death is the first domino to fall in this story. What follows is a good ole fashioned revenge story, as the protagonist Gage, sets out to erase every person that was responsible in Anna’s death. There are no superheroes here, no supernatural powers or surrealism. There aren’t even any real good people here. Just good old criminals doing criminal shit.
As I have so many comics on my pull list, I didn’t have time to read this comic each month when it released, but if you haven’t read this book yet but plan to, I suggest grabbing the trade. Even though it was released as six installments to the story, the trade has no breaks between chapters and reads as one cohesive story. While it doesn’t do anything knew with the revenge plot per se, the writing is still crisp and well delivered. Dialogue is fairly concise and smartly structured. Even with a limited amount of time spent with them, the characters are just developed enough to give the story a fair amount of character.
If you came for the old reliable revenge story done right, then you’ll stay for this great artwork. Matteo Scalera, who you might have heard me rave about on my Black Science reviews, handles all the art here and its glorious. While not having the same fantastical opportunities in this rooted story that he has on Black Science, he does an amazing job of showing the frantic movement and action in this book. Aaaaand, brutality. This book is handsomely brutal throughout as you would expect a revenge fueled crime drama to be.
Essentially, this is a good and quick read. Not many turns or twists to the story, just all out action, chaos and redemption. Definitely worth checking out.
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