Buckle Up For A Fun Ride — Reviewing ‘The Last Driver’ #2
by Tom Smithyman
Overview
You have to love a series with a passionate creator that treats its subject matter with respect yet still doesn’t take itself too seriously. More importantly, it features beautiful fast cars to gawk at!
Overall
9.5/10“So what do we do?”
“We drive.”
No other set of dialogue could better explain Sean Murphy’s The Last Driver. Murphy, who writes and illustrates the limited series, is known for his love of cars. His hardcover sketchbook is dedicated to autos. Heck, he even has a gear shifter knob tattooed on his hand.
So leave it to Murphy to celebrate driving and fast cars in his latest series. Now in its second issue, The Last Driver gives starts with some backstory then switches gears to the near future where all driving is done for humans. The outlaw Clutch is the titular ultimate driver on a roundtrip to get a new heart for his granddaughter. He’s being chased by the cops and likely being set up by the questionable man who sent him on his expedition.
Along the way, there’s friends (all of whom are named after cars) who help him with his auto issues and well as cops (both human and robots) trying to stop him. The details are hardly important here. What is top of mind is really a celebration of driving, and more fundamentally, of human choice and freedom.
That may sound too deep for a series about illegal driving, but Murphy is dummy. His ongoing Batman “Murphyverse” is surprising in its take on the character (in many ways, it was the precursor to Absolute Batman.)
All of that said, seeing Murphy’s depictions of cars — from the detailed interiors to the chase scenes to the impossible jumps — make this chapter and this series worth picking up. Do a lot of his main characters from series to series look similar? Sure. Is the premise on the silly side? You bet. But we’re willing to overlook those minor issues when treated to a Sean Murphy Corvette racing down the street.
As Clutch says to his granddaughter: “Buckle up.”
The Last Driver #2 — written and illustrated by Sean Murphy, colored by Simon Gough, and lettered by D.C. Hopkins — is now available in comic book stores and on digital platforms from Image Comics.
