2 out of 5

Dave Dorman’s ‘Rail’ short that was in the A1 vol. 2 anthology was mostly wordless.  It didn’t have enough space to work with what seemed to be some pretty big ideas, but the concept was intriguing and Dorman’s art on it was pretty astonishing, giving a nice clear vision of a post-apocalyptic steam-punky Mad Maxy kinda’ wasteland.  Yes, we’ve seen it and done it before, but the approach had promise nonetheless.  And apparently Dorman sat with his concept for a few years until it mutated into a full on ‘Rail’ world… that was intended for several comics and books I suppose, but only amounted to one prestige, one book, and one short CD-sized comic.  Having only experienced this, the prestige, I think we can account for why it didn’t quite take off.

Dave Dorman art and story, Del Stone script.  And this is unfair, because I don’t actually know the division of labor, of course, but we’re going to hold Del accountable for that reason.  The pages are again just bristling with ideas – and it’s sort of a poor idea to sell this as a contained story because it’s absolutely an intro – and though, again, these aren’t new concepts (our world is actually called ‘The Wasted Lands,’ hyuck), as The Matrix demonstrated, sometimes some visual zip can take us a long way.  Dorman’s characters are dumbly named – ranger Edgar Wallace, nicknamed Edge because “he seems to walk the narrow edge of life or death without a care” – life OR death? hyuck – detective ‘Iguana,’ and then your typical ‘we’re in the future’ names like ‘Brim’ and ‘Skid.’  There’s an evil railroad baron – one of 8 rulers of the land – named ‘Grin’ because of a nifty scar.  All of these roles are pre-defined for the genre.  But interesting elements get sprinkled about when Edge gets mixed up in an Arthurian prophesy, straight up discovering a sword and being tasked with collecting pieces for the stone in which to encase it, and then there are the masked and silent “drones” who’ve apparently been left to their own devices to build strange towers on the outskirts of town, having done so since before the ‘Iron wars’ that set the stage for the ‘toxic’ world of MORTAL CITY.

Whatever.  It’s silly, but Dave’s Heavy Metal-esque solid style, clear inks, and a rich coloring job make it fun to look at, plus Dave’s grasp of action is pretty clear and action-movie exciting.  There are a couple nudges to remind us that this IS supposed to be pulp, just in case our eyes are rolling too much.

But Del Stone.

It’s as though someone else described the pages to him (her?) and then he sat down and wrote the script from memory.  It’s fucking overwrought as shit, and deliciously over-bearing – Edge hears a sound, which is shown as a sound effect, and Dorman draws edge looking toward the sound.  Del makes sure to tell us “Edge hears a sound.”  Not an explicit example, but extrapolate that to every fucking panel – EVERY FUCKING PANEL – and it destroys any sense of a link between story and art.  It doesn’t help that the edits are fucked, with punctuation astray and some words missing, and one instance where it seemed someone didn’t plan the words to the panel properly, since we get word balloons split mid sentence.  Nice.  There’s an opening prologue that sets the stage for things and the bar was sort of high at that point – you could tell (and are told in a post-script by the editor) that this concept had been brewing and getting more and more detailed for years, so you’re front-loaded with info but its gleefully done.  And then when we transition to ‘Edge’ and Stone repeats shit we just read several times over two pages, the bar drops.  Later, when his disruptive captions give us unnecessary beats for the action, the bar drops lower.

It dropped to two fucking stars.

Too much info, poorly handled by poor writing.  The story fared better when it was mostly wordless.