Staff Picks (Jul13): RASL — Complete HC

Publisher: Cartoon Books

Who doesn’t love a good sci-fi noir? An experimental physicist running around with his partner’s wife, a hulking lizard-faced hitman with his hat pulled low, an inter-dimensional art thief on the loose… RASL has a lot to offer, but at the end of the day, I think its greatest feat is pure unsettling weirdness. Our protagonist plays out a unique blend of chase scene, exile, and vision quest as he races forward from danger, slips backward into memory, and slides sideways into other worlds. In the eerie desert landscape Jeff Smith bends heavy science toward the mystical and the absurd—just close enough to take your eye off the prize, the solution to the puzzle and the core of the mystery. As Annie warns in chapter two, “The closer you get to the center, the faster the turning points come.”

~ Kate Henning