#drowntown

Actually, the post-Apocalyptic hat doesn’t really fit the world of Drowntown all that comfortably; the seas have risen, yes, but not catastrophically so. There’s little chance of Kevin Costner rocking up in his catamaran, breathing through his neck while merrily quaffing his own piss. If you lived in a first floor flat in Drowntown’s London, I get the impression that the worst you’d have to contend with would be the odd patch of rising damp.

The rich and powerful (displaying the characteristic survival instinct that’d have a captain of industry on the Titanic blithely karate-chopping a septugenarian nun in the windpipe for her spot in the lifeboat) have bagsied and decamped to the highest ground, while the damp proletarian masses have to make do with submerged, nominally-watertight social housing. As an extra kick in the balls, the Tory Party is alive and well. Feel free to insert your own ‘cockroaches/Apocalypse’ joke here.

Page one of Drowntown introduces us to Leo Noiret, a lugubrious, down-at-heel former PI reduced to freelance bodyguarding, who looks like the lovechild of Jean Reno and a walk-in wardrobe, wrapped in a parade of surprisingly-tasteful Hawaiian shirts. He strolls though his storyline like a cross between Philip Marlowe and The Dude from The Big Lebowski, constantly puffing on cigarettes like rolled-up Axminsters and sporting the kind of arm muscles that would make Popeye look like Oscar Wilde by comparison.

Leo’s been figuratively hauled out of retirement (as well as literally out of a sort of urban swamp) by Alexandria Bastet, a glamourous and mysterious dame who has personally forged most of Africa into an alliance that now rivals the U.S.A and China in the old global superpower stakes, which is impressive given that she has no idea who she is. The first thing she remembers is waking up in the wreckage of a flying car in the River Nile as a young woman. She’s hiring Leo to discover precisely who she is. Ironically, I don’t remember precisely why.

So far, so Noir. We’ve heard all this before, you might think. I bet the PI’s a caustic cynic and the dame’s going to turn out to have been up to no good. Eh, kind of. Leo’s a bit of a grumpy sod sometimes, certainly. But he never really displays the kind of venomous misanthrophy common to a lot of members of his profession. As for Alexandria, she freely admits to having done some decidedly-not-cricket stuff to get where she is. So already, the characters' roles and their narrative functions have significantly advanced from the point a lot of people would expect them to occupy at such an early stage of the story.

That’s not all Drowntown has to offer, mind; there are two story strands, set 17 years apart, and it ratchets backwards and forwards between them like a dipsomaniac Time Lord. The two stories are expertly interwoven but not emphatically signposted, so skim-readers may come acropper and end up not knowing what the hell’s going on, but that’s what they get for having the attention span of a concussed gnat.

The other, earlier storyline stars Gina, who runs the Drowntown equivalent of a motorcycle courier service, only with a rocket-powered jetski serving as a bike. Too often in works of fiction, the ‘Female owner of struggling business’ character trait is paired with the ‘hard-working single mother’ one, seemingly for no other reason than to insert a gap-toothed little tot with puppy dog eyes that occupy 40% of its head into the proceedings and provide extra heartwarming when the narrative sends it and its mum a wealthy man to rescue them. But that isn’t Gina. She’s more like a gender-swapped Han Solo, a cheeky, charming chancer with a nice balance of worldly cynicism and youthful hopefulness, who catches the eye of someone miles above their social station.

In Gina’s case, it’s Viktor Drakenberg, a handsome (but bored) society heir who looks like Bruce Wayne, but then don’t they all? He comes across a bit smarmy and entitled, especially when he gets his first date with Gina by arrranging for her to courier something to a fancy restaurant, then tells her that the something is her, the flash sod. Anyway, he’s clearly up to no good. In fact I might go so far as to speculate that he might be a Cad and a Rotter. I really can’t wait to see how Gina’s story develops when book 2 comes out in October.

It’s got a great supporting cast, including a host of bio-engineered animal people, who look like they’ve wandered onto the wrong soundstage on their way to the set of Grandville, and I for one couldn’t be happier to see them. The number of Noir detective stories that feature the protagonist being beaten up by a monkey and a panda are depressingly few in number.

There’s also an MP we’re clearly supposed to dislike, given that he’s explicitly referred to as a Tory, which is more or less the same as calling him Dread Baron von Kittenthrottler in my book.

In terms of the creators, I feel I must declare an interest; I am a massive Robbie Morrison fan. Nikolai Dante is my all-time favourite 2000AD comic, mostly because Robbie Morrison has a masterful flair for writing characters, and the characters in Drowntown are as excellently written as a decade of reading Nikolai Dante led me to expect them to be. Also contained within the dialogue are brilliant little touches that really help to flesh out the world in which the story takes place, and what future-slang there is flying around is easy to understand from the context and not laid on with a rocket-propelled laser-trowel. Best of all, people swear properly, with good, honest Anglo-Saxon cuss words. None of your “Drokk”s or “Shtako”s here, my friend. In the world of Drowntown, they call a spade a fucking spade, then call you a pissing bollock and use the spade to deviate your septum.

My one, single, nimminy-pimminy, stereotypically-Leftie-liberal-bleeding-heart-ponce quibble about the book concerns Alexandria Bastet. By all means, let us have a female character badass enough to take the chaotic mess that Europeans turned huge swathes of Africa into and turn it into a global superpower. But Alexandria is herself sort of a bit…European. Yeah, we’re not in Muscular Christianity territory here, by any means, but fiction far too often robs Africans of any sense of agency in their own destinies and I think a trick has been missed slightly. Anyway, sorry. Hand-wringing over, everybody go buy Drowntown.

Now, let me give you an idea of the effect Jim Murray’s artwork can have on the unwary: panel 1 of page 1 is a simple head-and-shoulders shot of Leo, and I must have just sat staring at that one panel for about ten minutes, taking in the gorgeous, oil-painting quality of the art, the shadow and shine on Leo’s face, the ethereal quality of the buildings in the background, the shreds of tobacco leaf poking out of the end of Leo’s cigarette; fuck, about five of those minutes were devoted to counting Leo’s chest hairs. I was blown away by the level of detail Jim Murray had devoted to a single panel that occupies less than half a page. At one point, I even thought that the mad bastard had gone so far as to draw individual pores on the character’s skin, until I realised I’d peered too closely and was looking at the dots that made up the image.

I first experienced Jim Murray’s artwork when I was in school and I read the Batman/Judge Dredd crossover Die Laughing. Since then, to my eyes at least, he seems to have sacrificed the psychadelic freneticism for a tighter focus on movement and expression (though since I’ve only got one point of comparison when it comes to his sequential work, he may have been doing the roiling lunacy of Die Laughing because it was a Dredd story that prominently featured the Joker, so I could easily be talking out of my hat).

He’s one of those artists, like Roger Langridge or Sergio Aragones or (to use a non-comics example) Josh Kirby, who seem somehow able to imbue a static image with a sense of movement. No idea how it’s done. I suspect sorcery.

In summation, if you’re a fan of comics, and great comics in particular, you really really really need Drowntown in your life. It’s undoubtedly going to come to be regarded as one of the jewels of British comicdom before it’s over. In terms of setting, pacing and characters, it feels much more like a mainland European comic than an American, or even a 2000AD, comic. It feels genuinely unique, which is something that always needs to be celebrated.

I’d put money on there being a film and/or video game adaptation at some point, so take this opportunity to get in on the ground floor. Just be sure to bring a snorkel.