RaveSpectrum CultureJones empowers his characters with an affinity for gallows humor that affords opportunities for social commentary as well as relief from the tension. Working in a close third-person narration with second-person seasoning when the Elk Head Woman wants a word, he proves a master of propulsion, his sentences short bursts of power that drive you from page to page. He is a writer who lives up to his acclaim, layering so much history and critique onto a monster movie framework ... The violence is sudden and shocking in terms of the range of victim and manner of their deaths. One of the great beauties of Jones’ craft is his ability to fully realize his characters no matter how briefly they appear on stage. He derives our empathy for his four main leads but especially makes us feel for the collateral deaths caused by their terrible mistake. After hundreds of hours devouring horror stories on the page and screen, you will believe you can safely label the victims and survivors and invest your emotions accordingly, but Jones is fearless about defying expectations. It doesn’t take long to accept that reality and the ride becomes wilder, chilling and sleep depriving once you do ... The project to treat indigenous Americans as subhuman is at the heart of a long series of choices that continue to this day. The Only Good Indians confronts that in its title, and Jones has filled his book with so much humanity that you hope it’s the kind of art that alters perceptions. It takes all kinds of narratives to change the world. Given the times, it makes perfect sense that one should be a horror story.
Chris Ware
RaveSpectrum Culture...a stress-inducing yet cathartic examination of American brokenness ... It’s an exercise in empathy with the author hoping to express the arc of heartbreak and disappointment that makes people who they are, neither good nor bad but a mass of flawed humanity. This thesis crumbles by the end after the explorations of Brown and Lint, awful men doomed to awful fates of their own making, but the book is an astounding work of art with Ware again challenging our assumptions of his limits, comics as a form and the direction of tales of redemption ... This is more a book of open endings than happy endings for its mostly unlikeable characters, but Ware achieves the empathy he desires from our innate conditioning about how stories are structured ... Ware constantly ups the pressure on each of these characters and you find yourself rooting for them to make the right choices when they are so clearly doing the opposite. Rusty Brown took 16 years to make, during an era of war, isolating social media and a crumbling world. He might be afraid we’d forget to how to care for one another, so he bound an experience together as an emotional instruction manual. If you can care about these characters by the end then there’s hope for them. By extension there’s hope for any of us, no matter how awful we may be.
