Cover blurb
Hunted by giant primordial beasts, red in tooth and claw, a tribe of cave women scratches out a bleak existence in a brutal and uncaring world.
Clinging to a life governed by ancient laws and arcane rituals – the only constants they have – they follow the old ways on pain of death.
But One Path, a hunter and warrior, has a plan to change their lives – to break the deadly bargain they’ve made with the predators that stalk them, and it will upend everything they know.
Sometimes change is more terrifying than death.
My thoughts
Mention “cavewoman” and the first image that pops into the minds of people of a certain age is Raquel Welch in a fur bikini, from the 1966 film One Million Years B.C. However, the graphic novel One Path by artist Greg Broadmore – with Andy Lanning and Nick Boshier sharing writing credits – shares its DNA with the more recent cartoon series Primal, which chronicled the adventures of a Neanderthal and his tyrannosaur companion in a fantasy world where dinosaurs and humans live at the same time. Like Primal, One Path is filled with over-the-top violence and fantastic elements. Its female protagonists also spend the entire story completely nude, but these are not the fair-skinned, big-bosomed centerfold models of B-movies and other comic books. These are women whose bodies show the wear and tear of a life reduced to Darwinian survival, with the physiques and scars of people who have had countless brushes with predators higher up on the food chain.
One Path is labeled as “Book One” and as such, ends on a cliffhanger. That also explains its structure, with the story mainly a series of occurrences that set up plot threads to be resolved over the course of three planned sequels. The main thread follows the hunter One Path, who is a member of a tribe comprised entirely of women. Even the children are all female, which begs the question, where are the men? We get an answer later in the story that only raises more questions. One Path’s tribe lives a brutal life, always on the edge of starvation and not above a little cannibalism. One Path hatches a plan to assert her tribe’s dominance over the dinosaurian predators that share their world. She is eventually rewarded for her scheme, but there is a twist that sets up a conflict to play out in later books.
Meanwhile, readers are introduced to a teenage girl who gets separated from the tribe and attracts the unwanted attention of a pack of raptors, and an albino T. rex that terrorizes the tribe’s world. Then there are the full-page interludes showing landscape features made entirely of flesh. What connection do these have to the story? Again, we get an answer that only raises more questions.
As with most comics, the story is mainly told through its visuals, and this is where One Path shines. Broadmore’s art drips with color. For example, his skies are never a flat blue broken up with a few white clouds. They are pink and turquoise and orange, which heightens the mystique of the world on the page. Broadmore’s landscapes and humans are slightly abstracted, at least compared to the dinosaurs, which are drawn in painstaking detail. The only downside is that while the dinosaurs are meant to draw the reader’s eye, I sometimes had trouble telling the human characters apart, especially given that they wear almost no clothing to make identification easier.
Another area where Broadmore excels in illustrating action, which I attribute to his work in the movie industry. (See trivia.) Especially in the first half of the novel, there are action sequences that are brutal and kinetic and pop off the page. I’ve read comics where the artists were talented illustrators but struggled to translate motion onto the static medium of paper. One Path suffers no such problem, although be warned: When I say brutal, I mean it. The comic is very gory.
It is hard to give a final verdict for One Path as the book is only the beginning of a larger story. Readers don’t get many answers to the mysteries raised, and an overarching plot only starts to take shape when the cliffhanger ending drops. What I can say is I’m very intrigued about what comes next, because in terms of art, worldbuilding, and dinosaur action, One Path is an absolute success.
Trivia
- Greg Broadmore is a New Zealand-based artist perhaps best known for his work on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films. He also worked on Jackson’s King Kong and was lead concept designer for District 9. In addition, he created and illustrated Dr. Grordbort’s, a satirical send-up of Victorian science fiction. His website is gregbroadmore.com.
- One Path is the first of four planned books. Broadmore plans to publish the books yearly.
- Broadmore tried to have it both ways with feathered dinosaurs. There are feathered dinosaurs in One Path, but the raptors that play the largest role in the story are scaly. His T. rexes also share some similarities to the V. rex’s from Jackson’s King Kong, especially in their teeth.
- One Path is the most recent example in a small resurgence in caveman vs. dinosaur media properties in recent years. There was the aforementioned Primal, but there have also been pen-and-paper roleplaying games such as Planegea and Primal Quest, and upcoming video games such as Primal Planet and Theropods. These new caveman vs. dinosaur stories are much more open about being pure fantasy than films like One Million Years B.C., often incorporating elements such as magic and aliens.
Prehistoric Pulp 