Black River: the bleakest and most depressing graphic novel I've ever read


After reading Josh Simmons' Black River I had to read Cormac McCarthy's The Road and watch Requiem for a Dream to cheer myself up.

If Simmons' artwork wasn't so spellbindingly hallucinatory I would have stopped reading this grim odyssey of a group of women, a man, a couple of dogs making their way through a devastated wasteland in search of the promised land. Everyone in the group is afflicted with brain-crippling traumatic stress. They compound their misery by taking a joyless drug called gumdrop that "turns your head inside out." They encounter sadistic psychopaths. They die horribly. What's not to love?

Simmons' depictions of burned out buildings and blighted countrysides is made more surreal by his obsessively detailed renderings of the sky, with exaggerated Aurora Borealis trails, leaden Mammatus clouds, and impenetrably dense smoke. If you have a stomach for inhuman hopelessness, I highly recommend Black River!