Set in the late-1850s, in a small town along the Missouri River in northwestern Missouri, Pariah Missouri is a sort of supernatural horror-mystery. There are lots of things going on in this bustling river town, new arrivals from all directions. Native American bounty hunters from the west, free black men from New Orleans, a pair of entertainers from the east. Of course, there are people leaving as well. Maybe "disappearing" would be more accurate. The town marshal for one, and a few teen boys vanish as well.
Nobody is quite what they seem at first glance. The louche gambler, Hiram Buchanan, isn't just in town to throw dice and talk about how his suit came from Chicago. The man from New Orleans, Jean Lafitte, isn't much of a trapper, but he's got some other skills. And the entertainers have far more going for them than a Punch and Judy show and some fancy fireworks.
I think I bought this after Greg Hatcher touted it in one of his columns, probably back when he was still writing on CBR's Comics Should Be Good blog. There are two GNs, though I've only read the first. Can't find the second volume on its own, and I hate to double-buy things, which has held me back from buying the collected edition. Salazar sets the scene and several of the major players early on, then gradually peels back the layers. This also helps to establish why some characters would help Hiram, besides money. Even as one, obvious threat is dealt with, Salazar is setting up something bigger in the background that would threaten the entire town, and goes into its roots.
So there are characters that don't do much in this first story, that I imagine become critical in the second. Like a survivor of a band of Artful Dodgers that has a "peep stone" that guides him to buried things. Or another marshal, friend of the departed town marshal, who decides to stick around until he learns what happened to his friend. With a name like "Kane", I expect his response won't be pleasant.
Salazar tends to have certain colors dominate the pages. Mostly orange or blue, where everything is colored some shade of those. Occasionally, he'll go against the grain for effect, such as a casino that's most in orange and red, except for one lady, whose dress is a deep blue that really pops against the surroundings.
Pescado has a busy line, detailing every ruffle in the cuffs and train of an upper-class lady's dress, or scratching in the deep lines and stubble on the face of another drunken layabout gambler. He gets a lot of variety in the characters, either by clothing or facial hair or build, so you learn to recognize them, even if you aren't sure what their significance is yet.
Pariah seems large, not in terms of having a lot of people or buildings, but everything seems spread out. The rooms and lobby of a hotel, the streets. The deck of the steamboat seems to stretch forever into the background. Except on rare occasions where there's a crowd, rooms seems empty. Like everything has been built to accommodate growth that hasn't started yet. Or, like the town was built for more people, and it subsequently depopulated, like it's all that remains of some ancient capital whose builders long since abandoned it. I'm sure it's more the former, a town whose founders have big plans, but given the circumstances, the latter doesn't seem out of the question.
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