4 out of 5

I’ve reread this trade a dozen times and yet was never sure if I should risk collecting the rest of the series…  In part I guess I was a bit ashamed of digging on a CrossGen title.  Which is dumb, because plenty of good stuff came out from the publisher, there’s just this hazy fog of skeeviness surrounding them due to the way things collapsed at the end and people seemed to jump ship…  But also, I was worried that whatever followed vol. 1 wouldn’t live up to the fun balance Tony Bedard established in these collected six issues.  It’s not the most surprising or twist-turning story ever written, or particularly scary, but the characters have a refreshing air of realism in their movements (thank you, artist Karl Moline) and their dialogue, and events are paced almost miraculously patiently, while still managing to give us payoffs in every issue.  Perhaps most rewarding is what’s downplayed: Cassandra can “see” people for the monsters they really are; rather, there appears to be a group of un-human evil’uns working to collect souls for ‘The Adversary,’ disguised in their day-to-day jobs as doctors and meals-on-wheels workers as regular folk.  …Unless it’s time to attack, in which case they can look like Dracula, or Wolf-Man, or whoever, thanks to the age-old “people won’t believe anyone who says they saw Dracula” loophole logic.  Instead of making this the main hook the book hangs on, once Bedard introduces it and explains it, he focuses more on Cassandra’s escape – from a mental facility, from the evil pursuers, from the police – giving the book an exciting momentum and sense of direction and purpose.

Though Cassandra is college age, she’s a smart cookie: she responds quickly to events but with a believable dose of fear, as well, and puts two and two together at about the same speed we do.  Similarly, those that she runs across – a sheriff whose son runs afoul of some Wolf-Men, an ex-con who believes in her evil sight – move through their individual character arcs pretty gracefully, all things considered.  Emotional brevity happens for the sake of that momentum, but it’s not at the sacrifice of smart plotting or a reliable quality of dialogue.

The books do feel a little aimless – there’s not a clear cliffhanger or conclusion to any given issue – but this also adds to the travelogue appeal of the series, and veers it away from a monster-of-the-week event that would’ve probably been any other joker’s pitch for a book similarly themed.  And I’ll complete that demerit with some comments about the trade itself: you can go back and forth about what’s required for trades, but there’s nothing extra in this book.  The inside of each individual issue has a little catch-up blurb that’s written in the voice of a character… and sometimes these do reveal small, external details about events, so that might’ve been a nice inclusion.  Or some sketches, or an into, or something.  That being said… it was only 15.95 at the time, for 6 issues, so…  Could go back and forth.  At the time of reading though, I couldn’t get over the feeling that I was reading a budget collection of sorts, and it perhaps affected that decision of never tracking down the followup issues until a long time after.  I worry that the glued binding is going to go any day, but the paper stock and and richness of the color (great work on the latter by Nick Bell – a massive palette that never feels too far removed from reality but is appropriately dark for our ‘spooky’ scenes) make it solid to hold and pleasing to look at.

So I should’ve given credit to the fact that I reread the thing so many times, but whatever.  I’m sitting down now to make it official: that Route 666 was a great, unique horror series, and these first six issues set you off on incredibly solid ground.