{"id":124818,"date":"2018-05-02T12:00:20","date_gmt":"2018-05-02T16:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=124818"},"modified":"2018-05-02T14:41:02","modified_gmt":"2018-05-02T18:41:02","slug":"black-and-white-and-black-on-the-comics-of-chris-reynolds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/02\/black-and-white-and-black-on-the-comics-of-chris-reynolds\/","title":{"rendered":"Black and White and Black: On the Comics of Chris Reynolds"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Around the start of the first millennium, a territory on the northern coast of Africa fell under control of the Romans, who dubbed it \u201cMauretania,\u201d possibly derived from a native word or from the Greek for \u201cdark\u201d (or \u201cobscure\u201d)\u2014the root that eventually informed the term Moor<\/em>. Centuries later, the Cunard Line affixed the name to a giant ship, built in Newcastle and launched in 1906, which for several years enjoyed distinction as both the world\u2019s fastest and largest ocean liner, beloved by many, though called by Kipling \u201cthe monstrous nine-decked city.\u201d It was scrapped between 1935 and 1937, and parts of the interior found a home in a pub in Bristol.<\/p>\n

Eight decades after the RMS Mauretania<\/em>\u2019s maiden voyage, Chris Reynolds, a Welsh-born artist in his mid twenties, embarked on what would be his life\u2019s work, a beguiling series of loosely connected stories that he called Mauretania Comics<\/em>. The work had nothing to do with that remote place or with seafaring vessels of yore, and the name was just one of its many elusive mysteries. The stories were and are easy to consume but tantalizingly difficult to characterize. Droll dialogue gives way to utterly melancholy voiceover; locales like \u201cThe Lighted Cities\u201d and \u201cMouth City\u201d are mapped on the same imaginative terrain as some version of England, one where a blasted figure out of J.\u2009G. Ballard<\/a> might run across Russell Hoban\u2019s Riddley Walker. Monitor, Mauretania<\/em>\u2019s signature character, always dons a helmet with a striplike visor masking his eyes. (Today he wouldn\u2019t look so out of place: it resembles nothing so much as a virtual-reality headpiece.) The architecture alone is worth the trip: lipstick-shaped temples of music, a house like a geodesic dome crossed with a web made by a spider on acid.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The stories start on solid ground, then twist like dreams. Reynolds sets everything in uniformly sized panels, edged in black like funeral invitations. His impossibly thick line lends weight to these uncanny dramas of lost time. Calling the comics black and white feels insufficient; they\u2019re more like black and white and black. This starkness, and the stabs of poetic word-image interplay, can call to mind his stateside contemporary Raymond Pettibon, while the silent, depopulated spaces that loom throughout\u2014abandoned houses, vacant cinemas, phantom transportation\u2014suggest any number of uneasy de Chirico vistas.<\/p>\n

Reynolds never deploys Mauretania as a name in his work: it doesn\u2019t denote a vessel or a country or a planet. Yet it\u2019s perfect all the same. In a 2013 interview, Reynolds deflected the issue: \u201cMauretania<\/em> is called that because that\u2019s just what it had to be called. There were no two ways about it at all.\u201d So much of his world feels broken, voluptuously ruined to the point of enigma. Even the height of technology feels like a mistake: In one story, a man returns to his hometown and visits a professor who had solved the problem of time travel. The inventor is frozen in the same position as he was years ago, the last panel a virtual reproduction of the earlier scene.<\/p>\n

The roots of the word itself\u2014\u201cdark,\u201d \u201cobscure\u201d\u2014befit the graphic qualities of the art as well as the reception of these perpetually perplexing comics. They\u2019ve surfaced, briefly, in the mainstream. In 1990, Penguin published the graphic novel Mauretania<\/em> in the UK, a slim masterpiece of corporate paranoia that\u2019s somehow as gentle and lyrical as it is eerie. (\u201cA mystery and a love story from a darker world,\u201d ran the tagline.) Susan loses her job when Fern Ltd. shutters, then immediately gets hired by Reynal, where her superior is weirdly fascinated by her former gig: \u201cBecause, I mean, the lessons learned in a failing business can be really very useful,\u201d he says, unconvincingly. \u201cI\u2019d really like to know what you felt about working at Fern Ltd.\u201d She finds herself in a new world, one that seems to run on dream logic. When Alf, her old-employer-turned-Reynal-colleague, suddenly leaves for a job at Intercell Paint, Susan mockingly predicts that she\u2019ll come home to find that her mother\u2019s done up her room in \u201ca nice shade of \u2018Intercell\u2019 pink!\u201d\u2014which is in fact what happens. (The punch line is that the art remains staunchly monochrome.)<\/p>\n

In 2004, a Glasgow publisher, Kingly Books, outlined another piece of the puzzle with The Dial and Other Stories<\/em>, containing material from 1985 to 1992\u2014that is, stories over a decade old, yet oddly ageless. The title story itself bends chronology. It begins in full science-fiction mode, with the \u201cdemobilisation of the interplanetary fleet after Earth\u2019s defeat by the A.U.S.\u201d and murmurings of the titular alien religion; like Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy<\/em>, the protagonist finds his house on the verge of obliteration. But the story drifts ineluctably into the past, the futuristic frame falling away, until we\u2019re left with what might be a more somber take on New Order\u2019s \u201cLove Vigilantes.\u201d In a sequence called \u201cThe Golden Age,\u201d a boy named Robert goes on a psychic adventure with his schoolmistress.<\/p>\n

Then, nothing. Or so it could seem\u2014it was easy to lose track of Mauretania Comics<\/em>, an ocean away. Reynolds, in fact, has been self-publishing his older stories and continues to bring out new titles, some in color (and available \u00e0 la carte in a bewildering array of electronic editions). But his work has never reached these shores in traditional trade form until now.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The enthusiasm of the Canadian cartoonist Seth, whose 2005 Comics Journal <\/em>appreciation hailed Reynolds as \u201cthe most underrated cartoonist of the last 20 years,\u201d likely accounts for most of his readership on this continent (present fan included). In selecting the contents for The New World<\/em>, Seth has done more than gather some beautifully representative work. He\u2019s siphoned the ocean that is Mauretania Comics<\/em> so that we can see, more clearly than ever, the tension between unconscious forces and those of reason. The former compel wanderings, incessant returns to hollowed-out homes, random jobs that seem to serve no purpose and yet provide the key. (A day\u2019s work for one character consists of buying a kite for some kids.) The latter finds its culmination in the \u201ctrendy police force\u201d known as Rational Control.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf it\u2019s God telling him what to do, and it works, then there\u2019s nothing we can do,\u201d one conventional soul muses in Mauretania<\/em>, baffled by Jimmy, the strange figure\u2014and possible business competitor\u2014who\u2019s set up shop across the street. (Unsurprisingly, one of the Rational Control men dismisses any theory of the divine.) In reading The New World<\/em>, I was struck by the religious themes that flood the book, a concern echoed all along, perhaps, in the forceful composition of black and white. Should we see some link between the Dial, a religion brought to a conquered Earth, and Christianity, which we first glimpse in a two-pager called \u201cRailway Town\u201d? A panel shows the towering statue of Christ in Rio, one scene in the life of a stewardess-turned-usherette\u2014it didn\u2019t register with me the first few times. But then I noticed other things. In \u201cMonitor\u2019s Human Reward,\u201d the paneling of the door he sits in front of is cropped to resemble a cross; the spherical house is revealed, in the final wordless panel, to be topped by devil\u2019s horns.<\/p>\n

Is Monitor some sort of interdimensional savior, or a \u201cfruitcake,\u201d as one character suggests? (Does his omnipresent headgear suggest a superhero or just a variation on Doonesbury<\/em>\u2019s B.\u2009D., superstitiously unwilling to remove it?) He works mundane jobs at various points\u2014caf\u00e9 worker, freezer salesman (refrigerator magnate?), gold-mine agent\u2014but his name suggests he\u2019s the one keeping this world in order.<\/p>\n

Has Jimmy, who idolized Monitor as a child, stepped in to save this same fallen world? (He wears a similar ping-pong-ball lid, marked II<\/small> instead of M<\/small>.) Was Monitor God\u2014and is Jimmy \u2026 Christ? (Which makes one reconsider Monitor\u2019s close friendship with Jimmy\u2019s late mother.)<\/p>\n

These questions\u2014never so baldly stated, but there in plain sight\u2014struck me with a kind of aesthetic ecstasy, particularly upon revisiting the penultimate piece, \u201cSoft Return.\u201d Positioned right before Mauretania<\/em>, it\u2019s told in a voice we\u2019ve heard intermittently throughout the book, a confessional first-person: \u201cThis is my story: The story of someone who lost everything, and then found it again. It\u2019s about how I remembered my dream.\u201d The narrator relates how as a young man, despite being newly unemployed, he had refused to fight in the war, leading to a family schism. \u201cWe had all been Christians,\u201d he half-explains. Though the conflict isn\u2019t given a name, the narrator has one. When he joins the army, he drives something called a \u201cfoot-ferryboat.\u201d \u201cThey gave me that job because of my name: Christopher,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was my new life.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s someone else with that name: our author, Chris Reynolds. We needn\u2019t read the story as autobiographical, but I like the idea that the creator of this world\u2014its God\u2014is literally in the details, tucked away in one of the shorter pieces, only visible once in silhouette.<\/p>\n

Or maybe the author is present everywhere. On page seventy-nine of The New World<\/em>, Monitor sits at a table, pen poised above paper, having \u201cdecided to do a survey\u2014make a map showing all the mines.\u201d Something about the stillness of the panel, the will to order, the blankness of the page makes this resemble a self-portrait, one in which nothing and everything is revealed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ed Park\u00a0is a founding editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Believer\u00a0and a former editor of the<\/em>\u00a0Voice Literary Supplement\u00a0and for the Poetry Foundation. His debut novel,<\/em>\u00a0Personal Days, published in 2008, was a finalist for the PEN\/Hemingway Award for First Fiction.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from the foreword to\u00a0<\/em>The New World: Comics from Mauretania,\u00a0<\/em>by Chris Reynolds, published today by New York Review Comics. Copyright \u00a9 2018 by Ed Park. Courtesy of New York Review Comics.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Around the start of the first millennium, a territory on the northern coast of Africa fell under control of the Romans, who dubbed it \u201cMauretania,\u201d possibly derived from a native word or from the Greek for \u201cdark\u201d (or \u201cobscure\u201d)\u2014the root that eventually informed the term Moor. Centuries later, the Cunard Line affixed the name […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1478,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[33858,8310,8601,16982,33902,33905,33903,23005,33904,6426,33906],"class_list":["post-124818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-chris-reynolds","tag-doonesbury","tag-ed-park","tag-greek","tag-mauretania","tag-mauretania-comics","tag-mauretania-in-the-uk","tag-newcastle","tag-the-dial-and-other-stories","tag-the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy","tag-the-new-world"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBlack and White and Black: On the Comics of Chris Reynolds by Ed Park<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The roots of the word Mauretania\u2014\u201cdark,\u201d \u201cobscure\u201d\u2014befit the graphic qualities of Reynolds\u2019s art as well as the 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