2 out of 5

Publisher Black Caravan maybe has a bit of an editing / production problem. Pardon the accusation, as I haven’t compared who’s editing each book, and I’m not going to call out names, but the imprint rarely seems structured for individual issues. Stories are rarely broken up to be told well in that format, and though there are sometimes ads for a followup issue, it’s not always clear – books almost never end with “to be continued”s or “the end”s – if you’ve just read a self-contained story, or something to be picked up elsewhere (also due, again, to the issue-by-issue beats being uneven).

Swamp Dogs very much suffers from the above. This is one of BC’s best looking books, both art and color, with Kewber Baal’s layouts and figurework on Marvel / DC / Image levels, and Ruth Redmond’s colors appropriately maintaining the Southern horror vibe of the book – gore, sweat, and zombies. And though J.M. Brandt’s and Theo Prasidis’ characterizations aren’t my favorite – this is a series where not many people are very likeable – the dialogue has a natural flow to it, if rather stereotypical of each “type” of persona the characters inhabit. But the flow of the story isn’t one, inserting its conflict abruptly, while not having any momentum to the other side of its tale – bringing our characters together with the conflict.

That conflict was already mentioned: zombies. The players are a band, and two young women, the latter presumably (accidentally) bringing the zombos to the former when they’re being chased by them and run into the bar the band are currently inhabiting. …But that’s at the end of issue three. We’ve otherwise taken up the majority of two issues to dawdle with the two young women making out in cutoffs, and the band sniping at each other while driving to the bar. If you detect an old-school horror / grindhouse vibe to all of that, absolutely, but there’s no tension to it, and the tone never quite settles on being serious or silly. The third issue is then intended to be our zombie origin story of sorts, flashing back to the Civil War and doing a roll call of horribly murderous bastards who are likely our undead, and pacing problems again crop up – this roll call goes on for multiple pages, halting in place the interest of the story finally somewhat getting going.

Zooming in, these scenes work, but this feels like a full script (perhaps even for a movie) that was not optimized for a comic, leading to a complete lack of final-page punch to any issue, and a puzzling lack of urgency to the tale telling. Cutting away to zombie gore randomly would work in a film, for example, where the pace is guided by the filmmaker, but a comic needs to pair that with more purposeful storytelling. Swamp Dogs, instead, takes a slacker road to get there, just letting scenes play out in full without adding anything to the story or characters. And when we get to the interesting bits, it even starts to feel like pieces are missing, despite this otherwise languorous pace – characters are mentioned as though we’ve discussed them before, when they’re actually new to the story.

The horror poster covers; the general visual vibe – Swamp Dogs has the visual chops. Brandy and Prasidis also clearly know their world and the people in it, but between poor pacing (emblematic of many of Black Caravan’s books) and, as a result, an unclear focus, the concept never clicks.