Bayou. Volume one

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"Originally published online at zudacomics.com"--T.p. verso.
"Bayou Volume 1 collects the first four chapters of the ... webcomic series ..."--P. 4.
Lee Wagstaff is the daughter of a black sharecropper in the depression-era town of Charon, Mississippi. When Lily Westmoreland, her white playmate, is snatched by agents of an evil creature known as Bog, Lee's father is accused of kidnapping. Lee's only hope is to follow Lily's trail into this fantastic and frightening alternate world. Along the way she enlists the help of a benevolent, blues singing, swamp monster called Bayou. Together, Lee and Bayou trek across a hauntingly familiar Southern Neverland, confronting creatures both benign and malevolent, in an effort to rescue Lily and save Lee's father from being lynched.

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Amazing. Beautiful and horrifying. submitted by eknapp on June 18, 2014, 9:15am WOW. The first volume was wonderful. Set in the deep South in the 1930s, Bayou is the story of a courageous little black girl on a quest to save her father from being lynched for a kidnapping that he had no part in.

She descends into a Lewis Carroll-esque Mississippi bayou to find the missing girl. The bayou is populated with monsters and godlike beings, personifications of concepts and artifacts from the Jim Crow era. There's a sheet-headed creature named Nathan, which I assume is a reference to the Civil War general who founded the KKK. The evil but unseen Bossman's son is a smiling giant named Cotton-Eyed Joe who swallows people whole. There's a heroic dog named Woodrow, a second sheet-headed fiend called Jefferson, a murder of Jim Crows, and a murderous creature called a golliwog which looks like a cross between a racist old-fashioned black caricature and Gollum. I wish I understood more of the references...was Woodrow Wilson an equal-rights activist? Who does Jefferson refer to, the former president? I have some googling to do.

Bayou is beautiful, colorful, expressive. Just gorgeously drawn. A powerful contrast to the horrors of the plot and setting.