Review: The Lost Colony

The Lost Colony Book 1: The Snodgrass Conspiracy
Written and Drawn by Grady Klein
Published by FirstSecond Books. $14.95 USD

I read this one quite some time ago and really had little interest in reviewing it. It's fascinating to me that it has received the biggest publicity push from its publisher, when it's far and away their least effort. At first glance, it's impressive, because Klein has an amazing sense of color and is obviously very adept at the software he uses to create it. And it's not that he doesn't have anything to say--this is apparently the first of many volumes and I've no doubt he has vast notebooks and files full of story ideas and notes and this world is very real to him. The problem is that he has failed to transmit his ideas as good comics, or even as readable comics. On a fundamental level, his pages fail to engage the eye and carry it along from panel to panel with anything but minimal interest or momentum. It's hard to tell exactly why; the cover for the book is brilliant and dramatic, so it's not that he's totally incompetent as an artist. But let's try to figure this out. First, the faces of the characters are so abstracted at times that their expressions are hard to figure out. Is he frowning? Sniffing? Where's the mouth? Where's the other eye? That tends to lose a reader. The panels feel claustrophobic with their thick black borders and indifferently stacked rectangles and extreme close-ups. And the story just grinds along, with a bloviating politician/schemer type given way too much room to gab, a little girl who should probably be the reader's window into the story being vaguely sketched and given the heartwarming plot of wanting to buy a slave, and other appealing supporting characters like the strong, retarded Negro and the wise Chinaman who would embarrass Mickey Rooney with his offensiveness. There's also a kindly, dumpy Negro washerwoman type to complete the set of stereotypes. Tonally, Klein has ruined any chance for any kind of mature look at racism, if that's what he wanted to do, because of the caricatures populating The Lost Coloney as well as the tedious comedy and Green Acres charlatanism. I also think whatever color theory he has, he proves it wrong here, because changing the background color for each panel undoes any attempt to make this a cohesive world to draw in the reader, and using black only on the characters and not the backgrounds also makes their surroundings that much more artificial and forgettable. You never have a sense of this place. Unlike a lot of terrible books, this one is hard to see coming, due to the attractive cover and the initial attraction of the coloring and round, friendly figures one encounters on the first skim. It's like the poisoned apple, this book. Beware.