Grass Kings: Volume One

Comics, with their serial publication, seem especially fond of self-contained communities containing a full slate of recurring characters. L’il Abner and his hillbilly cousins in Dogpatch. Archie and the gang in Riverdale. Asterix and the village of indomitable Gauls. Springfield and the Simpson family. The Grass Kingdom – so named, I assume, because of its location on the prairies rather than its status as a grow-op – is a similar sort of place. It’s a scrappy (built out of scrap, looking for a fight) village vaguely located somewhere in the American (or Canadian) West. In this first volume we’re introduced to all the locals: the three brothers who constitute the kingdom’s first family, the sniper in the tower, the author, the pilot, the guy who sells the booze, etc. I don’t see where or how there’s a functioning economy, or even how everyone manages to stay fed, but they seem to get by as a group of people living together apart: “a closed community, running of the grid,” armed to the teeth and apparently left to their own devices by the distant gubmint.

For all its familiarity, I found the setting quite unique. In a similar way, the story feels put together out of borrowed bits and pieces, but taken as a whole it’s something very different. A woman rises out of the lake and her husband, sheriff of a neighbouring town, wants to take her back. She is reluctant, and violence breaks out. While this is all taking place in the present there are flashbacks that build up a subplot involving a serial killer living in the kingdom, and deeper historical dives that make the place out to be a sort of temporal nexus for violence over the centuries, or indeed millennia. This in turn plugs the story into archetypal narrative forms like myth, romance, and folktale, and we needn’t be surprised that scenes like the woman rising from the lake will be followed up by fire-breathing dragons flying around. That’s one way of saying this is a timeless tale, with the battle between the kingdom and the town of Cargill being like an episode in the Trojan War.

So hats off to Matt Kindt for the concept here, and the artwork of Tyler Jenkins makes a good match with its sketchy outlines and washes of watercolour nicely evoking the dreamlike atmosphere. Jenkins also draws horses well. The only pictures I felt he was pulling up short on were the police car being riddled with bullets and the bomb being dropped on the town. I didn’t think those kind of big, explosive moments were a good match for his light, almost transparent style.

I thought the characters needed to be a bit fuller, and there’s really too much going on, but for its world-building and multi-layered plot I’d give this high marks and a hearty recommendation. It’s one of the few comics I’ve read recently that I immediately went back through and read again, and it left me interested in seeing where it would be going next.

Graphicalex