One Coin Reads 16: RASL Book One The Drift, by Jeff Smith

RASL Book One The Drift, by Jeff Smith

2008, collected in 2018

Six years ago, I read comics to my daughter before bed every night. For months, we read one issue of Bone from the nine volume trades that make up the main Bone saga. She liked it, I loved it in places, I merely liked it near the end, but it's hard to be a comic fan and not respect the hell out of Jeff Smith and what he pulled off with Bone: he made a classic comic story over a thousand pages long, one that'll endure for decades if not longer. So I was interested in RASL from the moment I heard of it, though I'm only now getting around to reading it, after finding a copy for ¥323. There was no excuse not to read it.

RASL is not a very good title for a book

It was alright. Perfectly fine. It never built up the reputation of Bone, so I knew it wasn't going to have quite the same impact. But it had that Eisner sticker on the cover, so some people wanted to give it some love. The back cover blurbs excessively praise it: riveting, a masterpiece, sophistication, complexity. Those are big words, and I did not find them in this book. It was a comic, a well-done comic, but I didn't put it down hungry for more.

Starting the book off in the desert is a nice call back to Bone

Rasl is the title character's unlikely name. He is an inter-dimensional art thief, though the art thief stuff only happens in the first issue of the book, from there the inter-dimensional travel becomes the focus of the story. He drinks hard liquor from the bottle and visits prostitutes and strip clubs. And trouble finds him.

The rest of the book hints about a bigger story: military cover-ups, inter-dimensional traveler groups, and is Rasl one of a kind between parallel dimensions? I wonder how it read in 2008, because this sounds like any number of Image books being put out in the last decade, and that includes not having much understanding of the story at the end of the first collection. The book is a mystery box which hopefully gets opened in the other two books which complete the story. 

While Rasl starts the book stealing a painting, from there, he becomes a lot more of a passive protagonist: he's on the run, things are happening to him. He initiates a fight, or he chases a guy down, but he's not doing a lot that reveal stakes or character.

Smith expands his range into noir

Jeff Smith is an artist as well as a writer though, and unfortunately I don't like the art in this nearly as much as Bone. Definitely they share the same creator's hand, but the cartoony tone of Bone suited the story. Here, Rasl is drawn with a pinch of Neanderthal and a slightly oversized head. It doesn't wreck the book, but it distracts from the seriousness of the noir tone he was going for. Other characters look better, including the two sultry women in his life, and the villain of the book, a man in a trenchooat and fedora who has a warp in his face. But the main character himself looks janky. 

The book wants so badly to be gritty, and while it manages to do it here and there, the art might just be too clean to consistently get there. 

He wants to establish Rasl is a lowlife, but not a bad guy lowlife

Where the book shines best is the actual storytelling. The panel layouts and pacing are expertly done. Smith is not afraid to use silent panels to extend the moment or let things sink in, and it makes the whole book more immersive.

The bad guy is by far the most compelling part of the book

He has action sequences and talky sequences, and is able to pull both off with seeming effortlessness. The book is easy enough to read. 

I kind of get it. In music, there is a thing called the difficult second album, where a band spends years developing their sound and making a big splash on their first album, and then in a short amount of time are expected to repeat that on a second album, without repeating the ideas of their first. It's hard to do. Smith hit a grand slam homer with Bone, and followed it up with something a little smaller, a little more adult-oriented, and simply something different. I'm sure this was a challenge of a different sort from Bone to make, and I have a lot of respect for him as a creator for that. He didn't just make Bone II.

Ultimately though, RASL is a sci-fi story that isn't treading new ground, it's a gritty noir without the grit, and doesn't quite manage to be the experience it seemed to be going for. If someone put the remaining books in my hand to read, I'd be up for reading them, and maybe the first part of the story reads better knowing where it's all going. But I'm not going to go out of my way to finish this story.