Riley Rossmo has long been known for mixing love and blood together — and with his new Drumhellar series, which follows the paranormal investigations of a drug obsessed spiritualist, it looks like he finally found a way to bind these elements together permanently.

Here’s the official word from Image:

Psychedelic detective Drum Hellar searches for a wayward bog-man, but finds mutilated livestock instead. Meanwhile, someone has a gruesome job in mind for Drum’s elusive, soggy bog-buddy, and a new mystery for him to investigate…himself!

For a sophomore issue, there’s a lot of things this book is doing very well: we have a nicely crafted front-story, where our Quixotic protagonist Drum is busy searching for a bog-man that he accidentally awoke (and who’s threatening to eat kids at the mall). But we also have the subtle introduction of various characters that (the reader assumes) will be integral to larger narrative that writers Riley Rossmo and Alex Link are creating. This is exactly the kind of delicate universe building that readers want with inaugural arcs — a story that satisfies, but which also resolves in such a way that we learn what our new cast of characters are made of.

Drumhellar is a super dreamy and haunting book — it’ll be interesting to see if readers are willing to take the plunge with a title that feels a bit like Twin Peaks meets your standard high school acid trip. But if they do, it’ll be because of the beautiful art of Riley Rossmo. Rossmo’s style is already fluid beyond belief, both magical and expressive and it seems to have found a perfect home in Drumhellar. The art is by far the best thing going on here.

Drumhellar is like nothing else out there. Really. So if you have a thirst for outstanding art, and a high tolerance for strange and spacey tales, this might be the book for you.

5/5