Drive Comic, Act One Book Review

This comic gets a lot better when it’s read all in one go. I started reading it as a fan of Sheldon (I’ve since dropped Sheldon from the comics that I read, it just got a bit… meh… for me), so I was reading each strip as it came online. If I remember rightly, Dave Kellett was working on Stripped! at the time and couldn’t keep to a consistent update schedule. Although, looking back it seems to have been fairly constant at weekly-ish for the first year, unless the dates in the URL are unreliable.

Regardless, reading a page a week is not the best way to read Drive. Especially at the Six Moons of Slaughter, an action sequence that happens in about 2 minutes and 20 pages (I’m not going to go and check these facts). The story in the Act One book started in 2009 and finished… I can’t find when it finished (the website has no archive page and individual strips are loaded by date), but it was sometime after 2011. 2 years for a very sequential story is a really, really long time.

The best way to read Drive is with one of the beautiful, Kickstarter, hardcover Act One books, like I did! There was so much that I’d forgotten about the story, and now I’m aching for Act Two so that I can see how some characters get out of the predicaments at the end of Act One… And I’ve just been going back through the recent pages to see if they even did make it out of Act One! Seriously, long-form storytelling in a weekly webcomic is not easy to follow. I’d forgotten what the Vinn were exactly, since they don’t show up often in the strip and they’re named often but described little (any description would be too much when you have all the pages in front of you, but 6 years after the description of the eyepatch tattoo of a race that’s not been seen for 5 years? I only have so much capacity for minutia!)

Anyway, I highly recommend this comic. You can read it online if you’re into binging archives, but following it on RSS (as I do) will ache to get each new page. It’s a million times better to wait and read it all in one go, it was absolutely designed to be read that way rather than a page a week.

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