Off-Beat Fairy Tales: Reggie-12

Brian Ralph's Reggie-12 strips are interesting in that they are very much of the moment and anticipated the moment a good decade ahead of time. What I mean by that is that these strips started running in 2000 but were only collected (and added to in 2013), and this is a time period when the Fort Thunder/Highwater Books aesthetic started to dominate popular culture in surprising ways. When one considers shows like Adventure Time, there's no doubt that the work of folks like Ralph, Mat Brinkman, Brian Chippendale and James Kochalka had a huge influence on that show's aesthetic and attitude. Of this group, I think Ralph may be the biggest influence on this kind of fantasy storytelling, one that involves a total immersion in one's environment balanced against identifiable and active protagonists exploring that space. A book like Cave-In is sort of a master-class in that kind of storytelling.

Ralph is such a big influence because his work is a blend of accessibility and an uncompromising aesthetic. Part of that is his own blend of influences, including video games, Jack Kirby and general genre fiction. His status as a fan of that sort of work, at least as stuff that moved him growing up, gives him a remarkable amount of facility in telling that sort of story with his own aesthetic. That's true of Daybreak, for instance, a zombie story where one of the main characters is the reader. Reggie-12 is aimed more at kids as a send-up of anime and manga tropes, with Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy being the main target. The humor is frequently juvenile and scatological, but there are actual jokes with actual punchlines that are funny. Ralph isn't being raunchy in that sort of twee James Kochalka "Look at me! I said 'penis'!" kind of way; instead, his scatological jokes are well-constructed and funny to look at. Take the strip where Reggie-12's "waste fluid retention filter" didn't get changed and he starts to leak. When prompted on camera if it's like a diaper, the naive robot cheerfully says "Yes! It's very much like a diaper!" and follows that up by saying "You'd be surprised how often it needs changing". That latter panel has the reporter laughing out loud and another one laughing so hard that he's thrown his arms around Reggie. That's funny enough, but when another robot says "At least he didn't mention his posterior deflatulator", Ralph absolutely drives the joke home.

Drawn & Quarterly published the book in the best possible format. It's hardcover and oversized, all the better to allow the reader to fully engage in the level of detail and chicken fat Ralph throws into each panel. The single tone blue wash is attractive and helps provide needed contrast between the figures and their background; Reggie in particular is almost never in blue but instead is in crisp black & white. The comic features plenty of cute and funny drawings by Ralph, but it's always in a variation of his own cartoony style. One never gets the sense that he's dumbing down his drawing style to do this book; instead, he's simply focusing on a particular kind of drawing style (Tezuka, monsters, robots, etc) and playing it for laughs. While the jokes and gags are simple and the targets fairly broad and easy (this is a loving send-up, not a sharp satire), the level of craft Ralph applies to exploring environments or creating suspense in other comics is simply turned to thinking up as many jokes about Astro Boy, cats, scientists, labs, etc as possible. Ralph's storytelling chops and total mastery over his line and (most of all) page design enable to tell any kind of story with great efficacy, especially if it's a story that has kinetic storytelling possibilities.

Total Immersion: Daybreak

Brian Ralph came to prominence with the publication of Cave-In, a wordless story that followed the adventures of a monkey-like character exploring an underground kingdom. It was the clearest distillation of the Fort Thunder group of artists inspired by video games, role playing games, super hero comic books and fine art, wherein the environment is every bit as important as the characters, if not more so.  Daybreak (originally published as a series of three magazine-sized comics by Bodega) transplants this aesthetic to the zombie genre, thrusting the reader into the story by making them a silent character whose first-person view dominates the story.  In this manner, Daybreak mimics the action of a first-person shooter where one's character avatar is entirely off-screen.

What makes the book such a chilling read is that most of the action, and the zombies themselves, are also seen off-screen.  We only get shadowy views of the monsters and charred arms and legs sticking through doors and windows. There is no explanation given as to what caused their emergence or how the world got to be the way it is. It's simply assumed that the reader understands what's going on, and this implied understanding cleverly dovetails with Ralph's skill in quickly bringing a reader up to date with exactly what's at stake in the first few pages of the story. We're introduced to our fellow protagonist, a cheery one-armed man who graciously shares his possessions with you as you move from one charred, burnt-out environment to the next. Every panel is filled with rubble, broken objects and just plain stuff--the detritus of civilization. 

Ralph slowly amps up the action as we learn that it's our fellow humans that are the real cause of concern, not just zombies. Ralph heightens tension with any number of tricks: a driving rainstorm that darkens each panel for several pages. We tumble around the page as a car the one-armed man is driving with you in it tumbles over and over after an accident. The unseen protagonist and their friend are captured by a lunatic who plans to feed them to his "family", a group of zombies he had in his attic. The one-armed man is bitten, leaving the reader/protagonist with a horrible decision to make: when do they kill their former friend? The final page is especially unsettling, because it's unclear just how far along the one-armed man is in becoming a zombie, as we see his facial expression change subtly from panel to panel in a manner that suggests the spark of humanity is still in his burnt-out eyes--but for who knows how long?

Backstory is irrelevant here, because the only narrative that matters is being alive. The question that Ralph poses is what does humanity mean in a world that's the apotheosis of Thomas Hobbes--nasty, brutish and short?  With no laws and no rules, what does ethics mean in this world? Ralph suggests that one's choices while one is still human are the only thing that matters. The one-armed man still wound up as a zombie despite his generosity, but at least he wasn't a head-toting lunatic like the man who tried to kill him with his "family."  Ralph puts the reader through the wringer in scenes where the unseen protagonist is wandering around in the dark with a flashlight before discovering a gang of zombies after he spies only their legs. The frequently silent storytelling approach is doubly immersive: we are immersed in this world thanks to the details in each panel, and we are immersed in how to negotiate this world thanks to panel-to-panel transitions, black-outs, and quick cuts. Ralph's storytelling is absolutely masterful, filling the reader with dread and fear even as he injects moments of hope and black humor, alternating between blindingly quick moments of violence and languid looks around the environment. When the unseen protagonist is unconscious, the story goes on without them, a disorienting but effective technique that helps break tension at particular junctions while resetting it at the same time.The tiniest victories have a great resonance in this story, even as each defeat feels like a harbinger of inevitable doom. The six panel grid works nicely to keep the pace of the story steady, though I did miss the bigger pages of the original comic.

Off-Beat Genre: Daybreak #3

Rob reviews the third issue of Brian Ralph's zombie epic, DAYBREAK (Bodega Distribution).

I reviewed the first two issues of Brian Ralph's zombie post-apocalyptic story DAYBREAK in an earlier column, and I noted that the story is so striking because of the way Ralph immerses us in his world. It's an ugly, broken world that is densely depicted, and the reader gets a visceral understanding of what that world is like as Ralph tells the story from the point of view of the reader, an unseen character in the story. This issue ramps up the stakes, tension and horror considerably.

The one-armed protagonist and the unseen reader stand-in have been captured by a crazy old man, whose purposes are uncertain but most likely nefarious. The issue is a tense showdown between the one-armed man and the old man as they scheme around each other, with the first climax culminating in the unseen character taking decisive, explosive action. The old man wound up double-crossing our protagonists in horrific fashion, as the one-armed man met up with the old man's "family", with dreadful results. With the knowledge that his days as a human are now numbered, the issue ends on an uncertain note.

Once again, there is no explanation or backstory presented by Ralph. With an assumption of the audience's familiarity with this sort of scenario, Ralph drops the reader into a disorienting situation and challenges them to keep up with the shifts in tension and tempo. We go from moments of tense waiting to sudden frenzies of action, punctuated by moments of black humor (like the way a certain human head is used as a prop). Throughout, Ralph displays his chops as a visual storyteller, especially one sequence where our nervous unseen protagonist walks outside at night with a flashlight. The panel where we see the legs of zombies appear in the view of the flashlight is especially chilling. At this point, I'm eager to see where this story is going to end up. It feels like we've reached a middle point of the story, and I can't imagineDAYBREAK lasting more than a couple of more issues, but we'll see.