Zeb Larson reviews Sombra #1…
Justin Jordan (John Flood, Spread) tackles a provocative topic—the violent drug cartels of Mexico—partnering with artist Raúl Treviño, who lives in Mexico and is drawing on his first-hand experiences to inform the story.
A DEA agent who disappeared in Mexico years ago has resurfaced and is now out-brutalizing some of the cartels he was sent to investigate. His daughter has been tasked with stopping him…by any means necessary.
SEE ALSO: Check out a preview of Sombra #1
Sombra takes us to a dark place (har, har): Mexico in the midst of the Drug War. A DEA agent named Conrad Marlow has gone rogue after the violence of the war got to him, and Danielle Marlow, has decided to try and go after him. Conrad has decided that the only way he can beat the cartel is to beat them at their own game, and Danielle is going to come face to face with the unmitigated violence of the Drug War. I will try and keep this review spoiler-free, so read on without fear.
There are shades of Heart of Darkness going on in Sombra beyond the obvious allusion in Conrad Marlowe’s name: the white man who’s fallen into savagery, the place where life is cheap and anything goes, and the white interloper there for a mission and seeking her own answers. Of course, it breaks with Heart of Darkness too (Marlow wasn’t chasing his own father, which would add a whole other dimension to that story), and there’s a far greater sympathy for the Mexicans who must endure a drug war that has been foisted upon them. Joseph Conrad sympathized with the Congolese who suffered and died because of the Belgians, but it’s unlikely that he could imagine them as equal to Europeans either.
For those of you who might want a few statistics: more than a hundred thousand people have died so far (not including tens of thousands of people who have disappeared), journalists are regularly targeted for execution if they report on cartel activities, and it has set off a new refugee crisis as people flee the violence. The fighting isn’t necessarily going to bring an end to drug trafficking either, as cartels have been increasingly moving their operations to Guatemala and Honduras, or for the European market, into West Africa.
Whatever Americans might want to think about the drug war, we have to remember we exported it to other countries that then get to do the brunt of the fighting against drug cartels, the same cartels we’ve created profits for in the first place. Congo in the Heart of Darkness was suffering under the yoke of Belgian imperialism, which the Congolese did not ask for and had to endure as best they could. Does that sound familiar at all? All of the Mexican characters we meet here are enduring the drug war as best they can, but none of them have any kind of stake in “winning.” What would winning look like, apart from not disappearing into a shallow grave?
So, all of this is really interesting thematically. I’m more confused by Danielle, who sees and hears all of this from multiple different characters…and it doesn’t really seem to rattle her at all. From a dramatic perspective, this could go either way. Is this supposed to be a commentary about how Americans can just forget about the problems they create for other people? I certainly hope so, because she doesn’t express any concern at all with the violence Mexico has been plunged into. Conrad has been affected by it, but she’s strikingly impassive throughout much of the story. I’m just hoping this is deliberate in some way, because even Marlow in Heart of Darkness expressed horror at everything going on around him, albeit couched within masculine Victorian prose.
And if the connections to Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now are a good thing for the most part, they are fairly literal in this first issue. On top of everything else, there’s a pretty far out-there journalist named Esteban Tolva who’s got shades of Dennis Hopper’s character. None of this is inherently bad, but I want to attach a big caveat. Apocalypse Now falters because the content that wasn’t straight out of Conrad wasn’t nearly as compelling (Robert Duvall’s character aside), but you also don’t want to make a straight remake. This first issue of Sombra is a stage-setter, and I’m just hoping that it both makes a break with Heart of Darkness to say something new, and that it does so well. I’m optimistic for the next issue.
Rating: 8.5/10
Zeb Larson
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Originally published July 20, 2016. Updated November 14, 2019.
