COMIC BOOK

Dog Days of Raleigh Bottom

Dog Days of Raleigh Bottom is still one of the favorite stories I’ve ever written (and I’ve been talking about returning to it for years to give it the full-length structure it deserves). This gritty hillbilly noir follows thirteen-year-old Gauge in the wake of his mother’s passing. Living in what remains of a coal community, the real-life ramshackle valley known as Raleigh Bottom, West Virginia, Gauge is left to fend for himself. Things go from bad to worse when his mother’s ex-boyfriend, the meth-smoking former karate instructor, Rex, decides that the mother’s trailer and everything inside it now belongs to him. With little other choice, Gauge is forced to go to war with the toughest SOB in the holler.

Similar to The Devil’s Share, the execution here is a bit rudimentary, but the concept itself, for the time, was something you just did not see in comics, and for that reason I’m proud of this book, regardless. I’m not positive if I actually coined the term hillbilly noir, but I like to tell people I did anyway, lol.  

words: JC Lacek

illustration: Anthony Mata

cover: Rhett Johnston

publisher: Whiskey Tango Comics

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