It’s the summer of 1970 in Southern California and four friends need money to get tickets for the upcoming Janis Joplin concert. Luckily, there happens to be a haunted stretch of highway on Proctor Valley Road that they decide to make money off of by offering paid tours of the area to rubes. But, oh no, the ghosties is real - and lotsa people gonna die!
I’m a big fan but Grant Morrison is not immune to the occasional crap comic and Proctor Valley Road, even though there’s another writer involved, is definitely a crap Morrison comic.
This is me a-speculating but I feel like this was a failed TV show idea that got repurposed into a comic. It’s basically “What if Strangers Things was set in the ‘70s instead of the ‘80s?” (the cast are all kids/nostalgia/spooky stuff happening in small town). In Supergods, Morrison talks about cynically consulting star charts and the like to dowse future trends and capitalise on them, so Morrison isn’t above being mercenary. And Alex Child, who wouldn’t have gotten this book published if it were just his name on the comic, is a TV screenwriter…
Regardless, this is a bad comic for many other reasons. The characters are a boring bunch and I just don’t care about the things these teenage girls do - lusting after boys, wanting to be an astronaut, not being a ‘fraidy cat - in part because Morrison/Child failed to make the reader care in the first place. Proctor Valley Road just happens to be haunted for silly reasons by uninteresting stock monsters (pretty sure the minotaur monster is a straight lift from Harrow County, which Naomi Franquiz is an artist on) and a cliched evil witch who has cliched evil witch reasons.
Cliches abound like the smalltown ignorant white jocks at the county fair and a librarian who appears at the right time for an info dump. There’s a lot of lazy storytelling choices here too - August somehow survives a car explosion that destroys a giant monster but leaves her with nary a scratch, despite her being under the car at the time of the explosion! When the girls are trapped in a burning house, some random dude appears to save them and then connects them to a shaman he’s related to to get them to the next plot point. It’s so contrived.
All of which amounts to a very boring and forgettable YA comic, which is what Proctor Valley Road is. A poorly conceived, weakly executed, overly written and unimpressive story that never once entertained - easily one of Grant Morrison’s worst comics.
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