DRIFTER V. 1: OUT OF THE NIGHT TPB (review)

Review by Lily Fierro

Since the Joss Whedon phenomenon of Firefly, we’ve seen many incarnations of the Space Western.

There’s something unsettling about the concept of a post-apocalyptic world in a post high-tech era, and perhaps that unsettling feeling drives our interest in this niche genre.

With the recent success of East of West, it looks like the Space Western sub-genre is here to stay.

At this point you may ask, what exactly defines a Space Western?

I’ll evade an exact definition, but provide a generalized one: A Space Western includes themes of dystopia in a futuristic science fiction world with the themes of lawlessness, nobility, and desperation common in westerns.

As a result of the hybridization of dystopian science fiction with westerns, the Space Western contains archetypal characters seen in either or both genres and plot lines common to both or either.

Given the general public’s familiarity with the two genres making up the Space Western, innovating from within the sub-genre proves to be a difficult task because balancing the old with the new can lead to something far too traditional or to something too self-aware and desperate to defy the traditional, amassing to a final work existing to rebel against core themes and motifs but without any central plot.

Yet, despite the challenges facing its own genre, Ivan Brandon and Nic Klein’s Drifter successfully balances this critical new to old ratio while maintaining the integrity of the plot and even creating an overall mood of suspense and desperation in a foreign but somewhat reminiscent land.

Drifter succeeds in pushing the Space Western further without alienating the tropes we love from science fiction and westerns by creating a distinctive world and fiction containing variations on familiar characters and their internal and external conflicts. There are space age prospectors and miners, a silent man without a name, a wayward preacher who warns of impending ruin, and an arrival of an unknown stranger who may just bring redemption and salvation to a barren land.

In addition to these expected characters, Drifter also includes ferocious Predator-like creatures who live in the darkest part of mines, giant worms reminiscent of Tremors, a land crustacean creature thriving on lightning that looks like my husband’s former electric blue crayfish on steroids, and some possibly extraterrestrial scavengers or mercenaries. Mixed all together, the characters and world of Drifter feel paradoxically familiar yet utterly foreign at the same time.

Abram Pollux’s space ship crashes in a lake on an unnamed planet, and he somehow manages to reach the surface. After trying to take a few breaths of air (which may or may not be breathable), a strange blue creature with a manatee-like face with a body like a dinosaur approaches.

Out of fear, Pollux attacks, and the creature’s companion approaches along with a mysterious masked man. As one of the creatures tends to its harmed friend, the masked man sends Pollux into a coma, and a some unknown time later, he wakes up in a medical room in a community in the middle of a desert wasteland.

The community seems to be in the middle of a war against multiple enemies, some seen and some hidden, and a sense of urgency and despair surrounds Pollux as he wanders about attempting to understand the people around him. In parallel to Pollux’s exploration, we see/hear the haunting fire and brimstone sermons from an emaciated priest whose words hearken back to a pre-Industrial revolution era when God was more revered and feared than any other force of nature.

The planet Pollux lands on contains the wasteland of a society that may have flown too close to the sun in its advancement, and as a result, it has reverted back to a wild west world with no laws, no government, and no concept of larger society.

Drifter, Vol. One: Out of the Night collects issues #1-5 and establishes the planet Pollux has landed on and his attempt to understand this different world.

With a realistic artistic style from Klein used to give birth imaginative landscapes and characters, the mysteries of the planet and its inhabitants come to life, and together with Pollux’s own curiosity and confusion in the new world, builds a palpable sense of suspense and danger and an overall mystery about what powers really maintain the equilibrium on the planet.

As you read Drifter, you get a sense that anything and everything can happen on the planet, and most likely whatever you run into will not be pleasant, even if you have positive intentions. In the world of Drifter, no harm occurs without a balancing act of goodness, and no act of goodness seems to go unpunished.

Containing the piece-by-piece construction of the character histories of a possible duo who could potentially put aside their differences to battle a greater evil (and even a locket-type picture of one their loved ones) of Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More and the dire tone of a post-apocalyptic future of The Road Warrior, Drifter contains an action and mystery filled plot in an engrossing fictional world. With little dialog between characters, each word has more weight, and furthermore, each action carries more meaning, making the slow reveal of each character, including the protagonist in Pollux, all the more exciting and nerve-racking at the same time.

With Brandon and Klein’s meticulously calculated distant, desperate tone, exceptional artwork, and captivating fiction, Drifter is on its way to becoming quite the accomplished Space Western.