'Season One' of
Renato Jones is titled The One %, which sets the stage for
what is not so much political analysis as a dynamic and savage attack
on the great divide in society, and the super-rich who frolic in that
chasm. It opens with the eponymous Renato, on his birthday, about to
inherit a huge fortune. 'You have everything you want', says his
childhood friend Bliss. 'Not everything', he replies, which sets the
stage in the quietest moment of this two-volume graphic novel, which
is a piece of stunning graphic art and visceral propaganda: the kind
of dissection of our present state that one wishes more dominant
media would be able to undertake.
From there we see a
wordless flashback, to a woman being murdered as a baby looks on, and
then its back to the present where Renato is a guest on a yacht
belonging to hedge fund manager Douglas Bradley. He's looking for
Renato to invest: 'this hybrid shit isn't going to cure world
hunger,' he gloats as he stuffs steak into his mouth, 'it's going to
monetize it!' Then it's time to party, but the party doesn't work out
as Bradley might like. Because Renato Jones is 'The Freelancer', and
his mission is to make the '1% pay'. 'For 20 years they've been
murdering the working class', he explains. Now he will start to even
the score.
As written and drawn
by Kaare Kyle Andrews, Renato Jones is exciting, frightening,
powerful story-telling. It's extremely violent, at times so much so
that as the panels of the page explode it becomes difficult to figure
out exactly what is happening. But as you read you also see that
other scenes are calmer, more discreet, that Andrews matches the kind
of drawing and colouring (which he also does himself) to the moods,
which deepens the contrasts between his characters. 'Normal' family
life is portrayed as such, but in Jones' world of extreme wealth and
indulgence, the figures are drawn grotesquely, they are exaggerated
in size and movement, they are oblivious to their own ugliness.
Eventually it dawned on me: this is the kind of vision George Grosz
had of Weimar Germany; it is not so much satire as the reporting of
disgust. Critics may well look at this as a polemic calling for
Occupy to arm itself and turn the battle violent, but it's nothing so
crude. The beauty of the comics format is that it can play the
societal and personal stirrings simultaneously,contrasting the
psychopathology of the lone avenger with the sociopathy of his
targets. We haven't seen anything so instinctively accurate since The
Shadow was convincing Depression Era criminals that the weed of crime
bears bitter fruit.
Of course a one-man
vigilante war on the rich is a limited story line, and there are
complications in Renato's own backstory. His task is something he's
been raised to perform, by a family retainer named Church. And his
relationship with Bliss is complicated, another thing which Andrews'
inventive layouts and tones conveys with a combination of
passion and restraint. It doesn't help that Bliss' father, Nicola
Chambers, survives an
assassination attempt, and finds himself elected President of the
United States. The parallels to
Donald and Ivanka Trump are not subtle, but they are remarkably
effective. It seems left to satirists and graphic novelists to get
the inner core of Trump where mainstream media ignores it blissfully.
And as all this builds to an apocalyptic finish, there are moments of
extreme tenderness, of sad tragedy, as underplayed and effective as
the grand guignol of the bloodshed has been.
At times, Andrews'
art reminds of me Steve Ditko's, a cross between Doctor Strange and
Mr A, but Renato Jones is as innovative in its way as Spider Man or
Watchmen or the Sandman were in their time. It goes a step beyond
some of the very good noirish work in recent comics, to a place where
comparisons with Grosz are not unwarranted. You will not have read
anything like it.
Renato Jones,
Season One: The One % Image Comics $9.99 ISBN 9781632159007
Renato Jones,
Season Two: Freelancer Image Comics $16.99 ISBN 9781534303386
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