2 out of 5

Gawd, Abram, shut up.

Back when I was a Peter Milligan fan and struggling with justifying his crappy run on X-Men to my internal fandom, I read a review somewhere (yes, I’ve mentioned this before) that suggested reading all of his material like you’re reading a play.  Braying for the backseats, in other words.  And I went back to Pete’s more questionable output with this mindset and, for a while, was able to conclude that Review was right.  …But it didn’t really make the X-Men any better.  Soon enough, I could re-view that suggestion as saying that, essentially, Pete always wrote everything the same way.  So, really, it’s just a matter of when his writing works for the book and when it doesn’t, and his early, more (possibly) drug-influenced stuff benefited from the snarky overwroughtness, whereas his then modern stuff (and now modern stuff, frankly), to me, didn’t.  The lesson: you shouldn’t have to justify to yourself why you’re reading something.

The trippy dreamlike narration and structure of the first volume of Drifter worked for the Stranger in a Strange Land setup, and that the team of Brandon, artist Nic Klein and design-guy Tom Muller produced such a seemingly cohesive front definitely had me interested to check out their previous collaboration, Viking.  …Which… wasn’t Drifter.  And yet suggested that that narrative affect that enhanced the first arc of their sci-fi tale may not so much be an affect as how Ivan writes.  It sort of worked in Viking, enough that I was interested in reading the second trade, but it was more of a stretch to get into the story, and had me on guard for volume 2 of Drifter.

I won’t be reading the rest of Viking; I won’t be reading the rest of Drifter.  And maybe the problem is mine alone, that I’m not trying hard enough as a reader to pierce the obtuse structure, as comicdom seems to be digging the series as per the internet, but in my infinite judgy wisdom I feel like this is another Image bait and switch, style over substance, where we champion the book loud and proud after a first couple of awesome issues and then just keep reading and championing, without reconsidering if what we enjoyed is actually still working.  This is part of why I’ve switched over to reading in story arcs versus monthly, as it feels easier to spot these traps.  (INFINITE EFFING WISDOM, PEOPLE.)  But here’s the thing: the writing style is no longer working for the direction the story is taking.  And Brandon’s scene transitions (or perhaps Klein’s interpretation of them) are so incompetent that I literally uttered “What the fuck?” out loud as I reread a few panels over and over again to get some context on where the fuck the characters were.

Man, listen to me, getting angry again.  So in arc one, Abram crashes, doesn’t remember anything, is told that his crashed ship has actually been there forever, and we get some bits and pieces of a lost love from his past and then the arc ends with him seeing something that was an effective cliffhangy twist that deepened the “who am I?” mystery.  In arc two, Abram joins a group space-ing into the beyond to scavenge parts from other parts of his ship.  We get a little more backstory, I guess, and something something revelatory about one of the alien races we’ve seen.  Double I guess.  Because it feels like Brandon is treating the time that physically passed between arc one and two as time in the book, since Abram suddenly seems to fit into his surroundings like a glove.  The Outsider approach is abandoned.  Or maybe it gets lost in the fact that, with each new character, Brandon writes them all speaking in the same stupid mix of murky dream talk and one-liners.  Now you may say that this works in a Lynchian world where all the details are just an extension of one surreal concept, which is why this worked in the first arc.  But arc two wants to be an actual story at the same time.  It no longer makes any sense.  Add to that the dreamlike story structure, which then – again, since this arc apparently wants to be more sequential – stands revealed as just piss poor transitioning.

The art is good.  The design is good.  And the story elements themselves aren’t bad, just woefully constructed.  But for every period-less sentence the square-jawed Abram would utter, I hated him more and more, just once wishing he would speak like a freaking human being.  Even the goddamn brawler in a subplot with the sheriff talks in this manner.  Farts.