Tanya Dorph-Mankey's Count The Lights #2

The second chapter of Tanya Dorph-Mankey's queer wrestling epic, Count The Lights, ratchets up the tension between the intense heel wrestler Alan Jacobs and his infuriatingly casual rival Ryan Roberts. The story is told from a kayfabe perspective; that is, that the matches and stories behind them are real. Dorph-Mankey works big: big pages, big panels, big fights, big emotions. Wrestling here serves a function not unlike the songs in a musical: when the emotion of a situation is so overwhelming that mere speech no longer suffices to express it. As such, the actual wrestling moves all feel authentically drawn, and Dorph-Mankey is careful to pay a lot of attention to detail in how the men move in the ring. Jacobs is ambitious and clearly has a lot to prove in returning to the East Coast, and he can't stand how Roberts treats things like he's indulging in a punchline only he understands. 

The attraction that one would normally be subsumed in this kind of narrative is made plain and then demystified by the other members of his wrestling faction. The ridiculously bearded brothers Max & Jeremy are simultaneously his friends, his supporters, and also his enablers. The cruel leader of the faction, Caelum, tells Alan to fuck Roberts and get it over with. Roberts starts getting in his head and in his dreams. In one sequence, it's difficult to tell what's an actual match and what is the dream that he wakes up from. It's obvious that the lack of clarity is part of the point, but it felt a bit like cheating to advance their flirtation that far with so little warning, only to negate it. That thread is picked up again more effectively later, even as Jacobs continues to deny not just attraction, but his deeper feelings for Roberts as well. There are also signs of jealousy, as the easy friendship of Roberts' faction is very different than the survival-of-the-fittest quality he has with Caelum. The chapter ends with Jacobs once again trying to sublimate these feelings in the ring and challenge the champion, the mysterious masked wrestler Orion. There's a classic wrestling face-off, as Dorph-Mankey blends wrestling conventions with comics storytelling conventions in a way that feels both bombastic and organic.