Tribes: The Dog Years
Story & Script by Michael Geszel & Pater Spinetta
Art by Inaki Miranda
Colors by Eva de la Cruz
Letters by Comicraft's Jimmy Betancourt
$24.99 / 200 Pages / Full Color
Soulcraft Media / IDW
Here's the long and short of it. If you miss the glory days of Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona's Runaways, you're going to want and run out and grab Tribes: The Dog Years. And let's throw Y: The Last Man into the mix as well, because we're talking about the post apocalypse and all the masterful world-building provided by the best stories in the genre. But now that I've mentioned what this book's like, I probably ought to tell you what it is.
The Dog Years (first in a prospective Tribes series) describes a period in the not so distant future when tribal elders barely make it to their twenties. Here are the last vestiges of the once glorious human race, a species of children clinging to ritual and barbarism. They live out the meager two decades of their lives in woodland villages, huddled in modified refrigerator boxes, hunting wild cattle with spears and sharpened hubcaps. They heed the prophecies of a shaman who himself takes direction from a rubber ducky dangling from his staff. A mysterious virus--or is it a curse?--has ushered humanity right back to the stone age, and all there is to do is hunt and eat and breed and die, never to know the gaze of a grandchild. Never to grow old. These are the Dog Years.
In any other setting, Sundog would be considered a child. But in times like these, youth is forfeit. Sundog is a warrior. He hunts and kills. He helps protect his tribe from the feral headhunters, an even wilder class of human that has turned a ruined amusement park into something out of Mad Max. Sundog is brave, but more than anything he's angry. Friends, brothers, sisters are dying for foolish reasons. The cruel spirits of the Sky are picking off the Sky Shadow clan at an alarming rate. And after a dismal day of hunting, perched there on the crest of a broken stretch of highway, Sundog spies an approaching blackness. A helicopter. To him, some hulking iron bird. A sky spirit. The thing crashes in the wilderness, and when Sundog investigates, he encounters an ancient. A man in a jumpsuit, with hair white like snow. A man who claims to have known the warmth of 59 summers. But how can this be possible? How could he have outrun the virus? This man, this scientist, was born under the sea. And he knows how to end the Dog Years, how to find and disperse a cure.
What follows is an extremely thoughtful and compelling adventure told through vibrant, widescreen art. The presentation is very similar to that of 300, with big, wide pages. It opens the book up to vast landscapes, both beautiful and terrifying to behold. This is our world run through the threshers of time and decay. And it's all rendered with exquisite detail by artist Inaki Miranda, whose style really does harken to Adrian Alphona's. And given the detailed insert panels which zoom in on objects and precise movements, it also feels a bit like Frank Quitely's approach to We3. Eva de la Cruz also provides some top notch coloring, crucial in the shifting mood and tone throughout this quest. We see the wilderness. We see war. We see the rustic villages and dilapidated cities. We see the cold, sterile laboratories and spooky subterranean lairs. It's all spectacular, cinematic world-building, courtesy of writers Geszel and Spinetta.
I have, quite seriously, no complaints. Except that I don't have the second book on deck. Don't let this one fall through the cracks, because this is truly one of the most interesting new science-fiction stories you'll read this year.
Story: 5 / Art: 5 / Overall: 5
(Out of 5)