The Drowners by Nabiel Kanan

This collection of the self-published mini-series recently came out from Image Comics, and I had somehow managed to not pick up the last issue of the series despite enjoying it in floppy form, so I scooped up this collection to see how the whole thing turned out.

I remember reading creator Nabiel Kanan's early series, Exit, when it was published by Caliber Press in the early 1990's and enjoyed it immensely, particularly as the work of a nascent comics storyteller. It stuck with me and I have followed his work eagerly ever since. He has an extremely distinctive style, standing out against a background of other artists who work in black and white (I've only seen him work in black and white, the exceptions being titles like this which have grey tones added at differing levels). His early work frequently suffered from characters whose looks overlapped, causing a bit of muddled reading due to character misidentification, and in this title he is only occasionally off-model (some of you may have noticed that this is a fixation of mine). His earlier work depended on well done textures in the inking to add depth and variety to his panels, and he uses the grey tones to his advantage to supplant the hatching that he previously used.

The story here is somewhat rote plot-wise. This is not to say that it is unwelcome, just a little shelf worn. The skill, as they say, "is in the telling." He uses a sturdy cast on the solid basis of the plot, and the characters move through the story, rather than the story moving past the characters, which sometimes happen to the plot-driven ideas. There is one time, in my reading, that I felt that a character acted in a manner uncharacteristic, and it leads to a few scenes of forced resolution, but on the whole the characters are used to the author's advantage. The distasteful characters are distinctively unlikable, the sympathetic characters remain complex, and most characters follow an arc that feels right.

I recommend this book, and hope that this is the beginning of a good relationship with Image that is enabled by his Caliber-mates Joe Pruett and Gary Reed. I would like to see his work available in more comic shops as one of the creators in the realm of Frank Miller or Jason, those who tell genre stories without relying on that genre.