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Scalped, Volume 5: High Lonesome (2000)

by Jason Aaron(Favorite Author)

4.36 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1848564708 (ISBN13: 9781848564701)

languge

English

genre

Graphic Novels & Comics

series

Scalped

review 1: My grandaddy was full blooded Cherokee that come outta the Smokey Mountains in eastern Tennessee and ended up setting himself down outside of Memphis in a town called Ripley right around 1940. He'd already had one family on a reservation out east and just up and left them to fend for themselves before he took up with my granma and started a whole new family out there in the cotton picking fields of western Tennessee. He never talked about like on the reservation, never made a mention of his previous wife and kids except when he was feeling particularly mean and wanted to make himself and everyone else a sight more miserable than they alreay were. He died a few years after I was born, his hands so knotted up from pushing a plow that for the last eight years of his life he c... moreouldn't even roll a cigarette and had his youngest son do it, who was all of 8 years old at the time. So i don't know much of anything about life on a rez outside of a few stories about some wicked old nuns and some rough and rowdy late nights. I don't know anything outside of what I read anymore because there's no one else left alive to tell grandad's stories. So I can't judge much of anything in these books even though I am Cherokee and my people come off a rez a lot of years ago. But I do know when something feels right. When it feels like the truth. You can feel when something is genuine. And Scalped has surely been that.This is, however, by far the weakest installment of Scalped to date, this book is basically one long flashback. Although it tries to clear up a few plot points from previous issues, it fails to keep the reader interested in those points. I personally lay the blame mainly on the artists Davide Furno and Francesco Francavilla for deviating so far from RM Guera's amazing inks that it made it hard to focus. Their art lacked strength of tone or contrast and captured none of the violence or heartache that it was supposed to. It failed on all levels along with weak monologues and a lack of dialogue. A severely disappointing book in every way, but still head and shoulders above all other graphic novels currently on the market.
review 2: It took me forever to finish this volume, and it's not like it's difficult reading. I may stop reading the series, even though I've already bought the next volume. I do think High Lonesome revealed something to me though about the series: the true wellspring of most that has been good about it is the illustration of R.M. Guera, not the words of Jason Aaron. Of the five issues collected in High Lonesome, two have "guest illustrators." These two issues are completely boring, lacking in anything that might differentiate them from any other graphic novel for boys. I found myself skimming them, completely uninterested in the characters, especially that dufus Diesel and his woe-begotten childhood. I actually stopped reading for a month or two after those two sections. Then I got back to the final two, which are finally back to Guera's work, and it came to me. Though I could care less about any of these characters or their stories or their fakey dialogue, I LOVE the interaction of the frames - the way a scene compounds on the page, not linearly but in a way I can only describe as cinematic, and almost every issue ends with an image that lingers with me. Anyway, I'll probably give the series a break for awhile. Or maybe I'll just thumb through the next volume. less

Download links for: Scalped, Volume 5: High Lonesome

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