Set primarily in Los Angeles in 1971, Blood of the Virgin is the story of twenty-seven-year-old Seymour, an Iraqi Jewish immigrant film editor who works for an exploitation film production company. Seymour, his wife, and their new baby struggle as he tries to make it in the movie business, writing screenplays on spec and pining for the chance to direct. When his boss buys one of his scripts for a project called Blood of the Virgin and gives Seymour the chance to direct it, what follows is a surreal, tragicomic making-of journey.
Harkham adds the language of cinema, including intercutting and match cuts (where the formal elements of one scene are echoed in the next for visual continuity) ... Visual sequences, in which dialogue is kept to a bare minimum or dispensed with entirely, are among the most powerful in the book ... Epic in scale for a graphic novel — checking in at nearly 300 pages. Harkham spent 14 years on it, and the labor pays off
Harkham is adept at establishing the graphic equivalent of a musical time signature for each passage in his book ... This book is the kind of signature achievement that was conspicuously missing from [Harkham's] rich body of work ... A book about the discovery that family and art require the same resources.
If you’re a fan of cartoonists such as Joe Matt or Seth, and their intense feeling for lonely, hapless men, you’ll find plenty to enjoy here ... Harkham’s portrayal of LA’s seedy, grindhouse scene is pitch-perfect ... It does feel to me like a classic in the making.
