Joel Orff's graphic novel Thunderhead Underground Falls tells the story of Jack, a young army reservist who has one weekend left before shipping out for combat in the Middle East. He and a friend find themselves behind the wheel of his parent's car, driving farther and farther west into a snowy landscape. The book is an impressionistic exploration of Jack's flight from his future, as well as an exploration of this place that he's pledged his life to fight for. Jack and his friends want to experience the simple freedom of taking a drive, of seeing familiar things before his outlook is changed forever by the violence that he knows he will soon face. As the hours go by, Jack begins to consider desertion, but he knows that if he stays to hold onto the life that he knows, it will still be changed forever.
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*Starred Review* As snow falls at night, a car skids on a road winding through a pine forest. When it safely stops, the college-age woman driving it whoofs through rounded lips in relief. The young man with her looks relieved, too. They switch places and drive on as the whiteness of the snow fills the transition to the same young man, now sporting an army buzz-cut, on a plane. On the subsequent two-page spread, the young woman is out jogging in a hillside city. Turn another page, and the long flashback that constitutes most of Orff's exceptionally beautiful new graphic novel is under way. The lovers met only after Jack had enlisted, and they're spending the winter holidays together before he goes off to basic training. The campus is deserted, and the streets are empty because of the cold, so the couple drops in on friends and briefly, benignly invades a house with an unlocked door. Realizing a story so elemental that its like hasn't been done well since such World War II–set movie tearjerkers as the American The Clock and the Soviet Ballad of a Soldier, Orff is much less histrionic but easily matches those films in expressionist panache. Olson, Ray
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