The most highly anticipated comic book in years (aside from the sequel to Frank Miller’s Dark Knight) doesn’t feature superheroes, nor is it published by Marvel or DC. No, the title that’s got graphic novel-heads turned is RASL (pronounced “razzle”), a new quarterly black and white sci-fi noir series about a dimension-hopping art thief created and self-published by writer/artist Jeff Smith through his own Cartoon Books. RASL is Smith’s follow-up to the unprecedentedly successful Bone, a 1,443-page, all-ages comic book saga, self-published over a period of 13 years. Concluded in 2004 and collected in a best-selling, hernia-inducing, one-volume edition, Bone is currently being re-published in color by Scholastic as nine separate paperbacks, which already have collectively sold more than two million copies already.
It makes sense that Smith named his imprint Cartoon Books; reading Bone is like having a cartoon opera projected onto the inside of your skull. “Unlike film, which literally shows the audience where everything is and how fast it is moving, comics have to get the reader to do that,” he says. “It’s tricky, but you can control timing with staging and layout.” Bone is rendered with such fluidity, its characters are so fully-realized and its Lord of the Rings-esque adventure so compelling that, upon eye contact, pages become reader-animated.
Bone is also hilarious. Like a comedian adding a beat to activate the humor of a line, Smith fine-tunes his art for maximum laughs. “I work a joke until I laugh out loud,” he says. “Sometimes it comes right away, but usually I play around with it. The position of a word balloon can change how funny a joke is.” Smith prefers comedy that “surprises you… not by shock, but by coming out of the characters. The three Bone cousins are a play on the classic comedy threesome—Groucho, Harpo and Chico; Mickey, Goofy and Donald; Jerry, Kramer and George—and all of these are a play on the Id, Ego and Super-Ego.”
Smith describes his new series as darker than his previous work, but not too dark, “more James Bond than Bugs Bunny… In my mind, RASL is a bit like The Maltese Falcon, the Jason Bourne movies and Blade Runner. It came out of my love of physics and pop science with its conspiracy theories, multiple dimensions and Super Strings, and my desire to write a comic with a rotten character as the lead.”
In the first installment of RASL, our protagonist-thief straps giant engines to his shoulders, onto a suit he invented to go into the Drift, which transports him to parallel dimensions to snag priceless works of art to sell for “Bill Gates-kinda money.” The catch is that when he returns, he’s in such horrendous emotional and physical shape he needs to party hearty—drinking, smoking and wenching to drown the pain. But to start over and prepare to go back for more, he must go Zen and purify. Is there a parallel between this storyline and the often-punishing artistic process of living, loving, getting inspired and then bearing down at the drawing board to get pages done? “You are not the first person to point out the analogy,” Smith says. “But I didn’t notice it myself. Maybe I was too drunk. Or meditating.”
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