Review by C.J. Bunce

It begins like Steven Spielberg’s Duel, then it quickly turns into The Tourist with creepy characters straight out of Deliverance.  It’s a murky, action-heavy Road House story of trucker gangs and the search for a missing woman.  And it’s from Sandy King and John Carpenter’s Storm King Comics.  It’s the next Dark & Twisted imprint graphic novel, Long Haul. 

Cullen Bunn and Heath Amodio must have played with Transformers as a kid, because you can just see the future writers smashing their toy trucks as this story makes its way to the comics pages.

Trucker stories were a staple of the 1970s, with shows like Convoy, Smokey and the Bandit, and later Cannonball Run, closely paired with motorcycle tales like Easy Rider.  All the characters in this graphic novel seem like they spent more than their fair share of time in Sturgis, South Dakota.

When a pair of brothers learns their sister has been kidnapped, they embark on a road trip to rescue her, and they’re ready to kill anything that gets in their way.

This really isn’t about truckers at all, but revenge among degenerates and vile figures.  This is the kind of story you’d find in an anthology series.  Readers may find some callbacks to the running and chasing and hiding in Tremors and Maximum Overdrive, although this story is lacking the fantasy and supernatural.

One of the characters will have you thinking Bunn was going for his own spin on Pulp Fiction.  Artwork for the book was created by penciller Andrea Mutti, inker Gigi Baldassini, and colorist Valerio Alloro.

Add this to your pull list at Elite Comics or your local comic shop.  Co-created by Sandy King, with lettering by Janice Chiang, Long Haul is available here direct from the Storm King website, or here at Amazon.

Find out more about Dark & Twisted at stormkingcomics.com.