Creative Staff:
Story: Victor Gischler
Art: Taizo Bettin
What They Say:
Southern Louisiana, 82 years after the Fall. The apocalypse has come and gone, leaving behind a withered, ravaged landscape of wreckage and mutant crawfish. Still, you gotta laugh, and Sally does, often using her beloved shotgun, Bertha, as the punchline!
Inspired more by lust than common sense, and by a teenage desire to protect Tommy, the object of her desires, Sally leaves her bar job and joins the deranged crew of the Mississippi Duchess on a mission into the remains of New Orleans.
Saving the remains of civilisation plays second best to keeping her sweetheart safe as our smart and sexy princess of the wild frontier runs a gauntlet of gigantic genetic freaks and roving gangs of blood-hungry barbarians!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Taking the opportunity to explore the Titan Comics range of books has certainly been interesting, but often it’s just a title that will catch your eye. Sally of the Wasteland. That could go in so many ways. The series comes from Victor Gischler, who has written a brief range of titles overall, mostly from the Marvel side of the industry, that checking out something on the original side is certainly worth checking out. Gischler teams up with Taizo Bettin for the book, who doesn’t have a lot of credits over here, but that also means not a lot of visuals tied to anything. That opens up the creativity a whole lot more to let this book work to define his style, which is always a plus. The combination of the two gives us a book that feels like a quirky what else is going on in a world turned mad kind of book.
The series gives us an interesting setting where it’s some 82 years after what’s termed The Fall. Society is back down to mostly small villages and some towns at best that have pulled together. Those that have done so tend to be a bit cynical and wary, but also opportunistic in finding ways to carve out more for their slice of the world. What we learn here is that while there’s a lot of structural material left from the old world, it’s all in a shambles and people just exist within it for the most part. That’s a little bit of a throwback to some of the 80’s style and you can see this as taking place in a world similar to Mad Max in a way, just on the other side of the world. What really sells me on the book though is that it takes place in Southern Louisiana rather than in more familiar territory. We’ve got countless end of the world stories in familiar locales. Here? This feels fresh and new.
The book introduces us to a young woman named Kat who has arrived in a podunk bar in these parts where she’s looking for a boat crew to go on a job with her. Kat was originally out of Omaha as a part of a salvage team, a pretty solid one, but one that ended up with some really high end tech that revealed there’s a big power source out there somewhere. She and her team were intent on finding it, but over the course of the journey south towards it, she ended up as the only survivor due to bandits out there. So now she’s looking for new partners to go towards the end of the job and find out what it is that this device is leading her towards. The downside, she explains, is that it appears that it’s in New Orleans itself. When she reveals that, everyone laughs since the place is called the Forbidden city as there’s all sorts of river pirates along the way, mutant cannibals and something mysterious called Strangers out there as well. It’s a hellish journey that most would not take on.
But when she reveals what she has and what it may mean, a taste of civilization, a decent little crew of cutthroats form. And our title character is involved as well with Sally, a barmaid in the tavern where all this goes down. She’s a bigger than life kind of character with twin ponytails, a shotgun and a mouth that doesn’t stop as she goes on and off on everything. She’s got little interest in this job at first, but when the guy she likes, Tommy, decides to go, she opts to go as well in order to keep him safe since he’s your classic nice guy that will end up in a bad situation person. Naturally, things do go bad along the way, which makes up a small chunk of the second half of the book as the first is devoted to all the setup, and we end up with Kat, Sally and an unconscious Tommy out there in the wilds of the riverbank. Suffice to say, it’s a situation that favors people like Kat and Sally, though it’s a dangerous one.
In Summary:
The opening salvo of this series, a kind of grindhouse classic work, definitely has its appeal. Some of the dialogue may be forced, but it’s going for a particular style and does achieve it. Bettin’s artwork feels sufficiently run down and the coloring works to add to it, though I wonder if black and white might have hit the tone just a touch better. Gischler’s story is definitely fun here overall with what it does and I’m already just glad that the things out in the world that threaten the return of society isn’t more undead. We get crawgators, cannibals, pirates and strange things in the mix on top of the usual host of bad normal people that are likely to figure into it. It has the potential to go a couple of pretty good places, but it depends on just how intense it’ll get and how much it can draw us into the characters. Things move at a fast pace here so we get only so much time there, and it’s a whole lot of exposition as well alongside it. That gives it a packed and busy feel which is good, but also makes me look forward to when things get a little quieter and more personal. There’s potential for a whole lot of fun here.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Titan Comics
Release Date: July 30th, 2014
MSRP: $3.99
