When it comes to hard-boiled heroes facing off against demonic adversaries, Radical Comics has clearly staked out their own parcel of the shadowy turf. I recently received two review comics from the company, Driver for the Dead #2 and the premiere ish of Ryder on the Storm.
The two titles seem to mimic each other (kudos to Ryder for its play on the Doors, however); the two three-issue mini-series both star lone wolf heroes pitted against murderous supernatural nemeses.
In the second issue of Jeff (Snakes on a Plane) Heffernan and Leonardo Manco’s Driver hearseman Alabaster Graves continues the task of transporting the body of a dead witch doctor and his hot sceptic daughter across the swampy southland, pursued along the way by a necromancer who keeps stealing body parts from fortune tellers, collaterally slaughtering their unfortunate customers on the side.
The results are bracingly grisly, if a bit repetitive — by the time the third party of hapless Southerners shows up for a reading, we know they’re doomed — but it decidedly establishes what a mean s.o.b. the villainous magicman Fallow is. And Graves remains an expressive enough protagonist to make us want to see the showdown in issue #3.
In comparison, the tarnished knight hero of David (FVZA) Hine and Wayne Nichols’ Ryder on the Storm (no first name: “I don’t like it,” he succinctly explains to his femme fatale-y client) plays things a trace closer to the chest.
A p.i. working in an alt-universe 21st century cityscape out of a 30’s sci-fi pulp, Ryder gets hired by a Russian chanteuse named Katrina to look into the seeming suicide of a playboy who’s dispatched himself with a power drill. His investigation takes him to the Lust Garden, a decadent private sex club devoted to bloody sado-masochistic shows, and attracts the attention of the city’s wealthiest family — who would appear to be other than human.
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