So, I'm just going to paste the following review to Volumes 5 through 8.

If there's anything good about this enforced COVID social abandonment experiment we're all in the middle of as I type this (almost into week five), it's the ability to binge read a series of graphic novels like one would normally binge a Netflix series.

And this feels like a Netflix series. This is the darkest parts of Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul, but set on a dying Native American reservation, where everyone is stretched to their limit, doing the most horrible things to just get through the day. There's a corrosive bleakness and despair that runs through every page, and even when Aaron and company let a little light in, it's only so he can slam the door shut and cast the reader into an even more depressing darkness.

These are probably the most real characters I've ever read in a graphic novel series. I'm invested in every one of them, and I'm desperate for someone to find some hope to cling to before this all wraps up, but I really doubt that's going to happen.

This is one of the best pieces of fiction—in any medium—I've ever experienced. ( )

Devastating. ( )

Volume seven of Aaron and Guera's Vertigo series about crime and degradation on an Indian Reservation. There's a hint of redemption here as well, more so than in any of the previous volumes, and hard-won, high-cost, painfully vulnerable redemption at that.

Coming right out of nowhere is the heart-rending opening story about an old couple facing up to some grim realities, living in an isoated spot far from town. This is followed by a two-parter about Shunka, Red Crow's right-hand man, and that takes an amazing turn right from the get-go. After that, we travel to Vietnam 1969, and Dash's father's experiences in the war and after. Then it's back to Dash Bad Horse and Carol, two horribly wounded souls at the bottom of a long fall into utter self-destruction, just beginning to claw their way back to the light, if it's not too late.

Scalped is a dark, twisted, violent series, but in this volume Aaron writes the heart out his story and his characters, leaving them sad and sorry and alone, with darkness ahead and only thin shreds of human dignity to protect them. ( )

C'um camandro!
As histórias aparentemente desconexas da demais narrativa são muito boas.
A narrativa adensa.
E nunca desilude.
A arte perece ter ali um precalço qualquer, mas o restante é tão bom que mal se dá por isso. ( )

An old couple must face their age and illness and seek help from other people; Red Crow sends his right-hand man, Shunka, to sort out a feud with a rival Native American casino, but Shunka becomes embroiled in a murder; Dash's father Wade's background is explored; and Agnes Poor Bear tries to save Carol's unborn baby - and the past comes back to haunt the present. It's dark, it's gruesome, it's violent and cruel, it hits you in the stomach and, before you have caught your breath, comes back and punches you again. It's about humans, trying to survive in the harshest of worlds, desperately clinging to some ideal that they've half forgotten, partially due to an all-encompassing cynicism and partially due to their own growing coldness, but humans at the core, hurt again and again by their hope for something good that, seemingly inevitably, always turns to bad. It's a story that won't leave you alone for a long time after you've closed its pages. It's one of the best examples of noir I have ever encountered and I can only hope I encounter something as good again. ( )