Review by Ian Keogh
Avery Aldridge lives in Alabama in 1955, not a great place or era if you’re Black. His wartime heroism counts for nothing as he works at a lunch counter hearing the owner and customers disparage the equal rights protests taking place in Montgomery. Avery, though, has a secret. He only resorts to it during the most desperate of circumstances, but it means no-one can stand in his way.
Latoya Morgan is a TV scriptwriter, her experience shown in the confident way she splits Dark Blood into three time strands. In the present day of 1955 Avery’s circumstances have just become desperate. Ten years previously he was a World War II pilot who survived being shot down over Austria, and six months before the present day life wasn’t ideal and there were indignities, but it was peaceful and there were comforts. Morgan ensures all three plots are suspenseful, that the cast fit their assigned roles and that the one secret we all want to know about remains under wraps for a long time.
Walt Barna draws the opening chapters extremely efficiently, and at first it seems a step down when Moisés Hidalgo takes over the art. His is a looser style, and at first not as accomplished, but as Dark Blood continues any such thoughts evaporate, and the skimpier early art is either a settling-in period or the result of having to fill in at short notice. As events become ever more tense, Hidalgo creates the perfect atmosphere, closing in on Avery to show his discomfort and fear, and emphasising the appalling spirit of the times by having the police bulked out to fill entire panels. He even varies his style slightly to separate past from present.
Dark Blood isn’t what you might expect, as the title suggests horror. There is horror, but at the inhumanity as Morgan draws parallels between the worst of World War II Nazis and the very real threats African Americans faced in the USA’s southern states a decade later. The plot threads are efficiently drawn together with echoes of Captain America’s origin, but the focus remains very much on human activity, not super powers all the way to a bittersweet ending.
