COMIC REVIEW: ‘RASL’ by Jeff Smith

A man, wounded and bleeding, stumbles through the Sonoran desert, the sun beating down mercilessly from on high.  He is alone, with nothing but rocks and cacti between him and the horizon.  Stopping briefly to ponder the situation in which he finds himself, he casts his gaze up to the daylit moon, which becomes in his mind’s eye a pebble, falling into a pool of water and casting ripples which ultimately travel to a space somewhere beyond the edge of the page…..

This is the eerie, dialogue-free scene which opens Jeff Smith’s RASL, his first long-form comic book since the Eisner award-winning epic Bone, and the sense of desolation and dislocation which pervade it set the tone for what comes after.  The comic’s eponymous hero, we learn, is an art thief with the unique ability to travel between parallel worlds through a section of sub-space he calls “the drift”.  Stealing priceless works of art in one universe and fencing them in another, RASL seems content to wander endlessly between the worlds, until a violent encounter with a lizard-faced assassin sent by his old employers “the compound” forces him to confront his past, and embark on a race against time to stop a terrifying superweapon inspired by the theories of Nikola Tesla.

Whilst Bone maintained a sense of lightheartedness even in its darker moments, RASL is an altogether more jaded affair.  The hero’s trips through space-time aren’t part of some madcap jaunt, but are leaps into the unknown accompanied by terrible suffering; the series of bizarre characters he meets on his travels are less eccentric and more downright creepy; and the fact that each new universe brings with it nothing more than a variation on the same, desolate Arizona landscape reinforces the sense of hopelessness and the melancholic atmosphere which dominate the book from the outset.  Smith renders this bleak but beautiful adventure story in some of his most gorgeous artwork to date; every page feels drenched in atmosphere, and frequent runs of perfectly paced, dialogue-free panels allow the story to unfold in a simplistic yet compelling manner.  Smith hasn’t lost his knack for creating genuinely unsettling imagery, either, and there are several moments in RASL that will leave you with a faint sense of unease long after you’ve finished reading.

As a story, RASL is a peculiar mixture of road movie, conspiracy thriller and celebration of the life and work of Nikola Tesla.  Smith’s veneration of Tesla can wear a little thin at times, especially when he diverges from the plot to impart seemingly irrelevant chunks of the great scientist’s biography, but for the most part his application of Tesla’s theories in a science-fiction context works well.  Although meandering a little at times, the story contains enough intriguing mysteries to keep readers hooked until the last page, even if some of them appear to remain unresolved by the time the credits roll.  You’re left with a feeling, though, that all the answers you seek can be found somewhere within the comic, if you just look hard enough.  RASL sticks in the mind for a long time after reading, and that surely is the sign of a great comic book.