Bayou
Starred Review. Extremely beautiful, scary and wonderful, this Web comic takes readers to a pair of almost familiar, frequently threatening worlds. We first journey back in time to Mississippi, 1933, where a black sharecropper's daughter, Lee Wagstaff, is learning how to be strong in a segregated society. While Lee and her white friend, Lily, are playing near the bayou where black victims of racial violence are thrown, Lily is abducted by a monster—but Lee's father is blamed. To save him from a lynch mob by rescuing her friend, Lee enters the parallel universe of Dixie, where Southern folklore comes to life in disturbing echoes of our world. There she meets the eponymous character, a hulking creature living alone in a shack, troubled by disturbing memories and threatened by hateful embodiments of the South's violent past. When Lee convinces Bayou that he doesn't have to remain a victim, the two of them set off on a joint quest for understanding and redemption. Love's script and art, laid out in big blocks like Sunday comics, are lovely and eloquent; Morgan's coloring fills the panels with hazy sunlight and menacing darkness.(June)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.