2 out of 5

Rich Tommaso, whether spinning up one of his crime yarns, doing something more acerbic, more surreal, or more comical, tends to enjoy reveling in the normalities that lie between what would usually be the plot points of interest.  So big events are significantly buffered by many little ones: little thoughts, casual actions, conversation snippets.  Downtime.  As such, on occasion his narratives can be very snapshotty fractured, flitting around moments the way our thoughts might cycle between focuses, or the way life in general cam drift in and out of a similar “focus”: moments ephemeral or dragging by the whim of our perceptions.

Tommaso captures this sensibility without judgment: there’s not the meaning-laden moralizing or forceful “appreciate this!” sentiment that weighs down other indie artists who tread the same inbetween-scene pathways.  Darkly humored in its irreverent humanity, perhaps, but Tommaso’s work is otherwise impartial, which, for me, is a big part of its appeal.  Much like that above-mentioned roving focus, it’s like you’ve just stumbled into these stories: they unfurl, and the fitful organicness of it keeps you watching until it all fades to black.

This tends to work well in the abstract.  But when this techbique is exploded upon something with a stricter narrative – like Clover Honey – it works against it, undermining both the main story as well as its character-exploratoring guts.

Ostensibly a mini-noir of the crime-gone-wrong variety, Clover Honey splits our time between Abigail and Trevor, two low level thugs in a seemingly low stakes Jersey mob.  If there’s a major element at which the book really excels, it’s in that initial picture it paints: that these are faux-tough-talking youngsters, for whom crime just happens to be part of their day-to-day, while other dramas play out as they will.  As with most of Rich’s weirdos: they’re actually incredibly normal, just inserted into something Other.  But as the pages tick on and we circle around Abigail and Trevor on different sides of some problem – which I’m leaving vague because Rich does too, and for too long – the book becomes confused between noir tale and character study; time we might spend on thr latter gets obsessed with the former, and then we divert back to one or the other. As such, withholding the “what’s happened” is unfortunate, as it’s really a MacGuffin but inadvertently built up to be otherwise, and then, having spent much time delaying that, we’re rushed into a conclusion, with a rather sloppy and sorta illogical exposition dump filling in the blanks.

But hey, this was just the start of things for Rich!  And despite my criticisms, Clover has tue confidence of not an early book, though maybe that ironically works against it, as you trust the story, up until the ‘that’s it?’ final section.

In the Image re-published version, Rich redrew the first half of the story (mentioned in the backmatter), and though you can’t tell while reading it straight through, as chapter breaks prevent style trasitions from being abrupt, page to page comparisons show how the latter (older) half is a bit more indie, Gilbert Hernandez-generic, while the front half is pure Tommaso.  Either way, his cinematic eye was certainly intact from early on.  Otherwise: on flexible but sturdy paperstock, with some great process drawings / comments from Rich as extras in the back.  The story maybe ain’t all that great or impactful, but for Tommaso fans, this is an appreciated re-presentation that shows us how far Rich has come, and how his themes have evolved.