Review by Frank Plowright

In 1970 Chula Vista was every bit the border town it is today, except the people trafficking ran in the other direction, with guys fleeing to Mexico to escape being drafted to fight in Vietnam. August, Cora, Jennie and Rylee have other concerns, though, as Janis Joplin is coming to town in three weeks and they’re nowhere near putting together the eight bucks each needed to see her. Perhaps taking a bunch of jocks on a ghost tour of the Proctor Valley Road will raise some cash. After all, a very strange incident recently occurred there. Can the stoned hippy really have seen a monster throw a car down the street?

Proctor Valley Road is a peculiar beast. The attractive cartooning of Naomi Franquiz with the bright colouring applied by Tamra Bonvillain makes this look like an all-ages Scooby-Doo style outing. However, the gory details to the art and the constant swearing tell a different story. The girls themselves may shrug off constant misfortune with another snappy caustic line, but they’re faced with a demonic presence determined to take revenge for their historical murder on the present day residents of Chula Vista

Alex Child and Grant Morrison collaborate on the writing, and it’s just as well their target audience isn’t anyone who was alive in 1970, as many small period aspects are plain wrong. There’s no way a black American teenager would know anything about David Bowie, and casual swearing in everyday conversation was still a couple of decades away. The other side of the coin is the constant dropping of names from even further back to bolster the dialogue. Herbert Hoover? Jay Silverheels? This hasn’t occurred in any of Morrison’s work over decades, so the finger points at Child. Morrison does have previous for glib soundbite dialogue, so that’s less attributable.

All this nitpicking wouldn’t occur if Proctor Valley Road held the attention, but it doesn’t. It skips from preaching to simpering via a cast given a single personality trait instead of character, while the chapter-ending cliffhangers don’t lead anywhere, and the supernatural threat has little logic. A few clever moments and a neat resolution for Cora in particular don’t compensate, although add in that attractive art and the ranking raises to average.