Ashley Wood is nothing if not distinctive.  It used to be possible to stereotype his work as sepia blurriness (and for the most part, that used to be true), but he's developed beyond that now.  These days, Wood is much more about stark design, and producing comics that look like art objects.

D'Airain Aventure is a monthly anthology title from IDW in which Wood illustrates serials written by himself and regular collaborators TP Louise and Chris Ryall.  It's advert-free and heavily designed, with cardstock folded covers and minimal colouring throughout.

The main selling point will presumably be the prequel to Ryall and Wood's Zombies vs Robots, a story in which three competitive scientists get to squabble about who goes through their exciting new portal.  Ryall writes fairly conventional, but subtly amusing stories, and Wood draws his story fairly straight.  Ryall's other contribution, "Black Magick", is a five-page opening chapter about a haunted house inexplicably appearing overnight on a Californian suburban street.  It's a lovely premise, and Wood's design for the house is wonderful.

Both stories get extremely subdued colouring, which works well enough for the lab.  I'm not sure that borderline monochrome is really the right way of conveying suburban California, mind you.  It helps to smooth over the clash of sticking a haunted house in the street, and makes it easier for them to co-exist in the same art, but perhaps it becomes a little too easy.

The lead story, "Les Morts", is a much more elliptical affair.  It seems to be about an immortal man who makes a living by killing himself on stage and passing it off as an illusion.  A deserted town and what seems to be a drained sea apparently fit in somewhere.  There's a dreamlike quality to Wood's work that fits this kind of thing.

Wood's big problem used to be decipherability.  Notoriously, his contribution to Invisibles was so incomprehensible that DC had it re-drawn by another artist for the trade paperback.  He's still much stronger on atmosphere than on conveying physical action - the closing page of "Les Morts" is not as easy to follow as it might be.  But he's certainly a readable artist now, and there's an appealing quirkiness to the stories he's drawing.

Even so, there's still a weird clash between his spartan, monochrome style, and the sort of thing he's actually drawing.  Zombies vs Robots sounds like it ought to be over-the-top pulp fun, but Ashley Wood comics usually seem more like a witty entry for a design award.  They don't have the B-movie feel you'd expect for some of this material, and I'm not entirely convinced that they sell the concepts as well as they could.

But Wood is certainly idiosyncratic, and this is a likeably playful book - even if it's a very arthouse sort of playfulness.

Rating: B+

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