In California, Bakerstown has the last radio station on the planet. It’s the usual post-apocalyptic scenario. A mess all around, the starving, the mutations, the curfews, the resistance, the predator stranger danger.
As refugees make their way, stumbling and mumbling, they tend to gravitate toward the comforting sounds of Radio Apocalypse.
Into this environment, we step, with writer Ram V as the tillerman. Making the words, breathing life and death into the assembled masses, how humble and downtrodden. There is orphan boy Rion, for example caught pillaging. How will he survive the merciless retribution? Will the record just skip ahead, will the sound reach the canal, will the dust just be in the wind, the howling for more?
Artist Anand RK has a breathtakingly eccentric style. It’s cosmic and space dust, it’s afternoon delight, it’s devil-may-care. Anand RK renders the heck out of strangely shapes huts, hunched gunmen, and deep-set eyes. With colourist Anisha alongside, the embellishment has no limits. Yellow against mauve, red and pink and king’s blue all swim alongside each other, as time and tide wait for the next passing fancy. Beautiful lettering with lots of subtle range, from Aditya Bidikar.
It’s a hallucinatory read. It’s beautiful, but sometimes a bit hard to fathom. The faces can be hard to identify, the genders, the names, the ages of the drawn and quartiled. It’s hard to quantify in such loose renderings, with shaky lines falling, timbers shivering, and scratchy exaggeration in large doses.
That’s where the verbal narrative comes in, thankfully, helping us stumble along the sand, dragging our preconceptions, trying to rub two oars together to spark our understanding. But I would rather struggle to know “who is who” in a story like this one than spend the same $4 to fling myself through a thinner concept told by lesser-meaning creatives.
If your mind can allow you, consider buying this issue for a test run! Support a brave and honest new title, and turn up the volume!
Vault Comics, Radio Apocalypse #1, $3.99 for 28 pages of content
Newsdesk