Been a while since I've read any Lansdale stories, but I got into his short stories briefly after really enjoying his work on Jonah Hex, and his name on a comic will always at least get my attention. The Drive-In is typical Lansdale (and I mean that in all the good ways), mixing horror, Texas flavor and a sort of lost drive-in culture into a fascinating premise and a handful of interesting characters. Christopher Golden and Andres Guinaldo have taken this excellent raw material and turned it into a pretty interesting first issue, one where most of the issue is atmosphere and setup, but things never feel slow, and the payoff for all that setup comes in the increased horror at the bizarre situation that sits at the heart of The Drive-In.
Honestly, one of the problems I've had with many of Avatar's books is that they take great talent and give them fairly shoddy production values, but while The Drive-In still feels overpriced at $3.50, you won't hear me complaining about the paper grade or the printing quality here. Guinaldo's line-work is detailed and clear, and while I can't help but wonder how much cooler it would have looked in color, it is just beautiful artwork in black and white. Specifically, Guinaldo's establishing splash pages, like the first shot of the pool hall or the amazing double-page splahes of the drive-in itself, are fantastic to look at, and really draw the reader into the world.
The prose is just as important in creating this world for the reader, and while The Drive-In isn't a Lansdale story I've read, it's definitely not easy to pick out where Lansdale ends and Golden begins. Indeed, the genial, country narrator style that Lansdale has cultivated in many of his stories comes through in the narrative captions, which if I had to guess are 90-100% his. Golden's contribution can be seen in putting what was probably a pretty text-heavy story into a comic-book medium, and getting past one of the major hurdles of prose adaptations, namely leaving room for silent panels and not just crowding the pages with the prose. In other words, he knows where to let the art tell the story and where to use prose and dialogue to spice things up, and the result is a nice blend of atmosphere and clear storytelling.
At the center of The Drive-In is a horror concept, an event that traps a number of people in an unusual location for an unknown amount of time. But to really make that concept work, you need to care about the characters, and that's what issue one is all about. Golden and Guinaldo could have done a little better with distinguishing the four friends (I know their names, but I'm not sure I could attach the right one to the right friend), but they do a great job of showing us the happy, relatively normal lives that these guys lead, and letting us see that while they're flawed and human, they are likable protagonists.
Just as important is that you have to buy into some of the communal horror movie/drive-in spirit that obviously drove Lansdale to create the story in the first place. Thankfully, Lansdale sets the tone for that nicely with his opening prose piece, and Golden and Guinaldo finish the job with their shot of the drive-in on a Friday night, full of costumes, fun, tail-gate cookouts, sex and of course horror movies. I'm not the kind of guy who waxes nostalgic about the drive-in, even though I went to one more than once in my younger days, but it's hard not to see the appeal when you read about it here. And hard not to relate to the horror of being trapped there, possibly forever, at the same time.
