The Crow is one of the most emotionally powerful stories I have ever read. From the standpoint of traditional storytelling, it's not a perfect construct: there isn't a conflict in which we have any doubt about the outcome, and there isn't a readily definable climax. But The Crow is a gripping, evocative tale of love, atrocity, passion and vengeance nonetheless.

The Crow is the story of a young man, Eric, and his fiancee, Shelly, who are killed in an act of random violence on a road on the outskirts of Detroit. Eric is shot in the back of the head, and remains aware long enough to see Shelly's violation by the five men -- drug addicts, dealers and small-time crooks -- who commit the atrocity. One year later, he returns from the dead, a zombie guided by a crow-spirit to take vengeance on those men.

O'Barr wrote The Crow as a way of dealing with the pain of his own girlfriend's murder. Whether he succeeded in that goal is up for debate; I am given to understand that, by the time he'd finished this story, he had gone from depressed to suicidal. It's not hard to understand how that could happen; one of the key themes of the story is that even though Eric cannot return to the dead until his vengeance is complete, he is full of nothing but grief and longing for Shelly. And that grief is communicated perfectly to the reader.

Aside from what I mentioned above about the story not being a conventional narrative, the writing is solid and effective. The characterizations are consistent and complex; even minor characters, such as Officer Albrecht, wind up as more than the usual cutouts that most writers use for those parts. Literary references, most especially to poetry, are scattered throughout the book; also, after 1994, O'Barr added more poetry and art as a kind of appendix to the book.

The Crow, ultimately, is a powerful, moving and intense work of modern gothic literature, steeped in tradition yet unmistakeably now. O'Barr's dialogue and asides mesh perfectly with his artwork, some of which is conventional comic book line art, and others are breathtakingly beautiful halftones. There is no question that this book is one of the most important works of the modern age of comic books.

[ by Sean Simpson ]