Truly great narratives work where there are no words. Better still, all your senses are forced to be involved. You cannot tear yourself away from the pages. Most of all you must try to understand how this young boy came to be so calculatingly vicious. In this unforgiving landscape a teenager wrestles with a small dinosaur. It’s dramatic and over all too quickly. As you settle into finding out about this current situation, you’re catapulted into the past. Here we find out that the teen is baby KJ. His parents we immediately see are not likable people. A fading soccer star and his manager wife with their tense filled relationship don’t seem to have the right survival skills to be trapped on an island with giant reptiles running around. But there is a type of complexity to these characters that needs to be exploited. In issue one of ‘Savage’ Clay Moore is not playing around. He along with artists Lewis LaRosa and Clayton Henry seem to be out to show the world that what it needs now is a Savage Land.
When you think of the words savage and dinosaurs you may believe that this may be Turok, the Dinosaur Hunter’s story. However, the Valiant universe tends to reshape its history, not regurgitate it. Don’t expect anything to go the way you want. Even assuming that the baby in the comic is the teenager shown in the beginning. Essentially everything is up for grabs. What does make this story compelling is its nonlinear way of weaving the history of the lead character. The reader knows two things – this is all happening on an island and there’s at least one human inhabitant. What is not known makes this comic exciting. Are the parents still alive or long dead? How has this boy survived? More importantly, where exactly is this island?
Even though the story pulls you in it’s the artwork that makes you stay for the ride. There are Easter eggs everywhere. LaRosa and Henry use the smallest of details to give the readers clues as to how the opening pages came to be. Better yet, they make the words coming out of mouths of the characters potent. When Ronnie and Kevin Sr. are arguing, it becomes a multilayered examination of their entire lives together by the looks on their faces and their body language. That’s nearly impossible to do when nothing on the page is actually moving. What could look stilted and wooden, instead reveals so much about these two people. You get the sense that this trip is their last chance. Maybe they were happy once, but by the time the reader is introduced to them they look as if life has beaten them down. And when everything is falling around them, they get stranded in some otherworldly place with no sense of what they would consider civilization.
This is no ‘Blue Lagoon.’ No one is coming to save these people. And this inaugural issue is rich with potential storylines. Moore can make the lives in this world a living hell and make you love it. At the very least it would be a luscious looking place filled with danger. Who wouldn’t want to read more about that?
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