Everything to Know About DROME, a potential Book of the Year

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The Art of Lonergan

Channeling some of the legends of sequential graphic narrative while bringing plenty of his own flavor to the table, Lonergan uses Drome’s more than 300 page length to tell a creation myth that is equal parts fantasy and science fiction. The first thing that you will notice about Drome is the size of the book. This hardcover edition is 7.95 x 1.2 x 10.35 inches. The page size and page count both allow readers to enjoy the artistic detail as the story unfolds.

Beginning with Drome’s dust jacket and cover, and continuing through its endpapers and into the pages themselves, you’ll notice that Lonergan utilizes a grid in order to organize his pages. However, this isn’t anything like the rigid nine-panel-grid pages with which you may be more familiar. This grid is five columns, each comprised of seven rows. But depending on the page, these panels may be merged or split in a number of different ways.

Furthermore, Lonergan doesn’t always tell the story in a straightforward, panel-to-panel fashion. Frequently, different groups of panels on a page will be used to show simultaneous action, or highlight details that weren’t obvious in a larger central panel. In addition, Lonergan uses artful manipulation of white and gutter space in order to effortlessly guide your eye through the story, even when it isn’t following a standard Western comic panel progression.

Drome

As for the story itself, Drome tells a tale you are not soon likely to forget. As mentioned above, the storyline tells a unique and original creation myth. Under the watchful eye of enormous celestial beings, a violent people are conquered by the arrival of a superhuman who can survive battles with giant crustaceans and walk away from humanity’s attacks relatively unscathed. But how will the story be complicated when she encounters another, more feral superhuman?

What is perhaps especially remarkable about Drome is the fact that it accomplishes all this with a very minimal use of dialogue. While the graphic novel is not entirely devoid of dialogue, it appears only sparingly. However, Lonergan’s detailed and beautifully colored artwork more than compensates for the absence of more words.

Over the course of Drome, you will be amazed by how intimately you come to know the protagonists. You will feel exuberance at their victories and disappointment in their defeats. All of this adds up to an unforgettable graphic novel you’ll want to pull from your shelf and revisit again and again.