“Redneck” #4

Donny Cates is having one hell of a year. Seriously, this guy has been on a streak hotter than black asphalt in East Texas under a mid-day sun. Does “Redneck” #4 keep the heater going?

Cover by Lisandro Estherren

Redneck #4
Written Donny Cates
Illustrated by Lisandro Estherren
Colored by Dee Cunniffe
Lettered by Joe Sabino

In an attempt to stop the chaos engulfing their family, Perry and Bartlett revisit Bartlett’s past…but digging up old wounds sometimes opens new ones. What exactly is Bartlett’s big secret?

Donny Cates and Lisandro Estherren’s “Redneck” #4 serves up the comics equivalent of a fry pan half-full of hot oil on a stovetop burner. There’s a stillness to the surface. It’s not quite the calm before the storm, it’s more of a simmering tension – all it needs is something raw and bloody thrown in to really flare up, crackling with hiss and spit.

This tale of mesquite-smoked vampires burned through its first three installments. Cates barely let up the pace enough for the smoke to dissipate and Estherren’s rugged, rough-sketched precision gnashed with such fury there’s nary been a minute to look back. But that’s exactly what we get this week. Or rather, a look inside, as Perry takes a sojourn in Bartlett’s mind with the two mining his conscience to uncover the truth of what happened to Slap.

Now this trip through Bartlett’s backstory isn’t the most original take on the trope, but it’s executed well enough in “Redneck” #4. Cates has been dropping hints that this sort of issue would be coming down the pipe ever since tipping his hand that Perry could read minds. The mechanics of how it works is a little muddied, but it’s still effective in offering insights to Perry’s innocence and Bartlett’s stature as the seeming black sheep of the Bowman clan. At times, Perry feels like a bystander watching and commenting on Bartlett’s brutal transition to vampire by the hands and mouths of some desperate settlers. Other times, Bartlett interacts with her directly: dusting himself off, he sparks a smoke and assuages his concerned niece by saying, “I was food, Perry. Wasn’t personal.” And as they jump forward in his timeline, their conversation is cut off mid-sentence as he’s beaten back into a memory by a vicious blow to the chest from Granpa’s walking cane.

Estherren brings a rough-hewn aesthetic to this journey through time. The art feels like a tangled nest of scratches and bramble, and I mean that in the best possible way. There’s a desperate, scrambling quality to it that keeps perfect pace with characters just trying to make their way on the hard-scrabble plain. But there’s still enough clarity in execution, set-dressing, and character design that Cates doesn’t need to call out the passage of time explicitly in the dialog. Colorist Dee Cunnife uses a lavender-rouge base that’s faintly pastel to accent these flashbacks and slightly soften their bite. It’s wistfully evocative of sunset, and truly gives the impression that these moments of Bartlett’s past have long since passed into night.

Cates uses “Redneck” #4 to flesh out Bartlett’s character, as well as the Bowmans ties to the Landrys. When dealing with the former, there’s nothing too surprising. Bartlett’s frail, ragged confidence always made it seems like there was a bit of a coward’s heart in him, so to find out he was an army deserter and horse thief in his past life feels authentic. And the fact he was never a blood relative of JV, just an unlucky soul who came across Meredith’s kin on their own pilgrimage across the prairie – “It’s like I was part of a family… but I wasn’t family,” he says. “Like a dog.” – fits the distance and tension felt between him and the rest of the Bowmans proper.

And speaking of the latter, the animosity between Father Landry and JV always felt like it had a touch of the Hatfields and McCoys. So, it’s no real shocker to find out one of Father Landry’s forebears lost most of his family to a vampiric bloodletting. What does pique some interest, though, is that Augustus Landry was on the trail of a particular horse thief when his three brothers and a son were cut down. In terms of foreshadowing the ultimate reveal of Slap’s fate and what incited this current twister of death and vengeance, it doesn’t bode well for Bartlett that he was culpable when the first lives were lost in this generational feud.

It’s a bit disappointing that Cates doesn’t lay down a few more cards in “Redneck” #4. Sure he pays out some smaller revelations – Bartlett’s specific branch in the family tree and his role in the whole Bowman-Landry narrative, how Granpa lost his legs, etc. – but what happened to Slap and what Grandpa did after Meredith was killed are seemingly brushed aside. I feel as if Cates is saving these reveals to close out the arc. But it comes across like poorly decompressed storytelling not to have hit on them while we all spent an issue inside Bartlett’s head.

But that’s a pretty small gripe, in what’s an otherwise excellent issue. It’s got a moment or two where Cates and Estherren really let go – JV’s version of a “workable compromise” (i.e. shotgunning the legs out from under Grandpa) makes me believe the man has a relatively skewed definition of a win-win scenario – but overall, it’s a well-executed exercise in restraint. It’s half-history lesson, half-dire prognostication. “Just one endless story of someone dying because someone else died,” says Bartlett. Things might not be as hot as before, but Cates is still cooking.

Final Verdict: 7.5 – The simmer before the sear.