Check Out Bayou
By lunchcountersitin
You MUST check out what I regard as groundbreaking comic: Bayou, by writer/artist Jeremy Love of Gettosake.
Bayou is published by ZudaComics.com, an online comics site from DC Comics. The idea of online comics, at first, doesn’t seem viable. For comic book readers, there is a joy to holding the book itself, pondering its art and text, and going back and forth through a comic to find the words and images that really grab you. You can’t do that online.
But when it comes to Bayou… everything works.
Bayou is basically a children’s book, but this is not your mommy or daddy’s children’s book. Set in Depression-era Mississippi, it’s about a black girl who lives with her sharecropper father and “finds companionship with a blues-singing swamp monster named Bayou.”
The art is wonderful. The story line mixes elements of Uncle Remus, Alice in Wonderland, southern gothic, the Blues, African and Native American mythology, and Jim Crow.
The sheer execution of this makes me call it groundbreaking. Jeremy Love’s image’s fill the screen wonderfully; he’s calculated just the right scale to the art that makes it work on a computer screen. It’s a breeze to read the text, view the images, and go from one page to another. And Lee, the main character, is a truly heroic young black girl-the kind I wish we’d see more of in any genre.
Bayou is free. As of this writing, it has 129 pages of content, and the story won’t wrap up for several months. It’s a tale that will appeal to teens (14+) and adults, and people of all races. It has a magic that will touch everyone. Highly recommended.
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