Library Journal Review

Vertigo present new editions of Collins's original 1998 coming-of-age tale of a boy on the road with his father as well as the three-story sequel, first collected in 2004. The father, Michael O'Sullivan, aka the Angel, is a hit man on the run. Connor Looney, son of the Angel's former mobster boss, has killed the Angel's wife and youngest boy. The father and his remaining son escape and ally themselves with Eliot Ness and Al Capone in a bid for vengeance against the Looneys. The "road" that father and son take to reach a town called Perdition is fraught with peril. The Angel hopes to leave his boy in Perdition, but Looney's henchmen are watching. Father and son complete a series of bank robberies that weaken Looney's empire, with the boy at the wheel of the getaway car. Their journey is filled with murders, betrayals, confessions, and, oddly, love. Reminiscent of the manga series Lone Wolf and Cub, Perdition and its sequel each conclude on a somber and shocking note. The sequel fills in events of the road trip that were not included in the original. Verdict Rayner's art features blocky shadows and gritty crosshatching. Faces eloquently carry the heavy weight of burdened souls; every panel contains menace and dark foreboding. His illustrations emulate wood carvings and powerfully transmit emotion and plot in a gritty, hard-hitting manner. Incredibly sparse panels are counterbalanced with complex frames, creating mood and tension. The artwork by Garcia-Lopez, Steve Lieber, and Josef Rubinstein in the sequel is very good and approximates the style of the original but does not quite match it. The combination of Collins's story with Rayner's art is not to be missed.-Jeff Hunter, Royal Oak, MI (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.