RASL, Vol. 1: The Drift

RASL #1

by Jeff Smith

RASL -- a stark, sci-fi series about a dimension-jumping art thief -- a man unplugged from the world who races through space and time searching for his next big score -- trying to escape his past. In part one of three, Rasl faces an assassin's bullet and stumbles across a mystery that not only threatens to expose his own illicit activities, but could also uncover one of the world's most dangerous and sought after secrets. Collects RASL issues #1-3

Genres: Graphic Novels, Comics, Science Fiction, Fiction, Graphic Novels Comics, Fantasy, Adult

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 20, 2009

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See other authors with similar names.

Born and raised in the American mid-west, Jeff Smith learned about cartooning from comic strips, comic books, and watching animation on TV. In 1991, he launched a company called Cartoon Books to publish his comic book BONE, a comedy/adventure about three lost cousins from Boneville. Against all odds, the small company flourished, building a reputation for quality stories and artwork. Word of mouth, critical acclaim, and a string of major awards helped propel Cartoon Books and BONE to the forefront of the comic book industry.
In 1992, Jeff’s wife Vijaya Iyer joined the company as partner to handle publishing and distribution, licensing, and foreign language publications. In the Spring of 2005, Harry Potter’s U.S. publisher Scholastic Inc. entered the graphic novel market by launching a new imprint, Graphix with a full color version of BONE: Out from Boneville, bringing the underground comic to a new audience and a new generation.
In 2007, DC Comics released Smith’s first non-creator owned work, SHAZAM! Monster Society of Evil, a four-part mini-series recreating a classic serial from comic’s Golden Age. Between projects, Smith spends much of his time on the international guest circuit promoting comics and the art of graphic novels.

Reviews

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm kind of embarrassed that this book has come into my awareness, as I've been a big fan of Jeff Smith's work for years.

Most good books are difficult to pigeonhole into a tidy genre, but I might describe this one as a mystery-thriller with a bit of a sci-fi thread running through it.

If you're a fan of Bone (And I'm assuming you are) there's a few things to note here:

1. This comic follows Smith's style of not including any thought bubbles. (Like Bone) However, there is a fair amount of narration. (Which is rather different from Bone.)

2. This comic is less all-ages than Bone. This is something I might not have thought to mention before I had a kid. But my little boy *loved* Bone and read all of it at the age of 6. It was his first big solo reading project.

This book isn't quite as universal. There's sex and drinking and a lot of violence. Also, there's some science talk that younger folks would have some trouble with. Also, the story jumps around in time a lot, and I could see that confusing less experienced comic readers.

Worth your time? Yes.

Double points if you're interested in Tesla and you're a fan of Smith's style.

[Juho Pohjalainen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know if Jeff Smith's art style fits such a mature story so well. It's taking its time to grow on me. Everyone here looks so weird.

Not to say Bone wasn't mature, or serious, it's just... well, it had the bone creatures. The cartoons. Here, there's nothing of such. I don't know.

The story itself's fine, though.

[Randy Lander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jeff Smith returns to long-form comics after the success of Scholastic's Color Editions of Bone, with something quite different. It's a sci-fi noir tale, incorporating elements of Meso-American folklore, quantum physics and dimension travel and good old fashioned bad guys with guns. His protagonist is a hard-drinking art thief with a taste for the ladies, and the ability to travel dimensions to steal alternate world art.

With only three issues collected in this first collection, there's still a lot to be explored with RASL, and I suspect that we'll only know the true success/failure when we see the whole story completed. But Smith is clearly showing off his storytelling and art chops here, and if I were a betting man, I'd bet on this being another classic from one of the best cartoonists working in the medium.

The artwork is phenomenal. Smith's Bone was full of fantastic backdrops and characters, but RASL is set (more or less) in the real world, and a sleazy version of it, with back alleys, bars, etc. He's perfect at capturing this run-down world the hero has let himself fall into, and his character expressions and flawless action storytelling, displayed in Bone, are even more honed here.

The collection is oversized, which is great, because it really shows off the art. I continue to live in hope of a super-giant hardcover collection when it's all finished, at the enormous size that Smith printed his test run of the teaser comic in 2007, but if this is the best we get, it's still pretty good.

Fantastic stuff, and I'm completely enthralled and impressed so far.

[William Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-title this book 'Quantum Pulp Fiction' or 'Harboiled Sliders' or... ahh, just leave it the way it is, Jeff Smith knows what he's doing.

Rasl is a very serious departure from 'Bone'. It has mature content, is intended for mature audiences, all of the TVMA ratings would apply here except for gratuitous nudity. There's murder, theft, swearing, boozing, sex, and science-fiction. A damn good combination all around. The build-up is slow, but once it gets moving it won't stop. It becomes a perpetual motion machine powered by the sheer force of Smith's genius. The man has the perfect instinct when it comes to placement and composition within each panel and the arrangement of the panels on each page. His lines are near perfect and he's a master of the black and white medium, knowing exactly where to place shadow and where to leave off and let the positive spaces speak.

And it may not be the most original story, but not all of the world's greatest stories are the most original. Its solid and intriguing and makes all the right turns through the maze it sets up in front of you.

Grade: A

[Matt Sabonis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jeff Smith's Bone was simply amazing, and RASL is every bit as good. Smith does the same thing he did at the beginning of Bone and throws the reader in the deep end, allowing us to catch up with the story as events unfold, which is always a more rewarding experience than getting everything spoonfed to us, and also makes rereading the story a more desirable experience. Smith's cartoony style does seem at odds with the dark tone of RASL, though it begins to cohere better as the story moves along. Remarkably good stuff.

[Egan72 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excelente primer volumen de esta obra de Jeff Smith. Es una historia que mezcla ciencia ficción, novela negra y algo del universo de carretera que tantas veces hemos visto en el cine norteamericano.

[Francesca]

E niente, non l'ho nemmeno finito e non sono curiosa di farlo... non è proprio scattato il sentimento! XD

[Seth T. · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the 1990s I stepped away from comics for a while. Not entirely, sure, but I did stem my weekly habit of visiting my local supplier every Wednesday to pick through the new releases. I got kind of burnt out on the whole scene during that era. To fill the narrative hole left by my newfound and half-hearted abstinence, I turned to film.


[Hey there.]

The '90s were when it became more common for films to appear on VHS mere months after cinematic release—and at a reasonable price too!1 Then came DVD and my fair-sized film collection grew obscene as I reveled in the joys of directors' cuts, feature-length commentary, and all the bells-and-whistles that studios used to entice collectors back then. (Note: the early days of DVD were fertile for film lovers for all the bonus features packed into discs.) I began to consider myself a true cineaste.

Of all the modes and genres, the kind of film I found myself returning to most frequently was film noir. It was something in the alchemy of sight and sound unique to noir that won me over—that striking admixture of the stark lights and darks, the snappy hard-boiled cryptolect, the femme fatale, the hard-bitten antihero, and the existential journey that governs the mode. I devoured every piece of noir cinema I could find: the real stuff in the range of 1941 through 1958, the proto-noir police procedurals, the neo-noir homages (e.g. Chinatown or Phoenix), and even the sci-fi noirs (e.g. Bladerunner and Dark City). I read books on the subject, both popular (like Eddie Muller's Dark City) and academic (such as the wonderful Alain-Silver-and-James-Ursini-edited series of essays, Film Noir Reader ). All that is to say, I bear at least some small affection for noir, and when I returned to comics after my decade-long sabbatical I would have been pleased as a bourbon-spiked punch to encounter something in the mode in the comics medium.


[Not from you, apparently.]

Unfortunately, even in the world of black-and-white crime comics, the essence of noir seems incredibly difficult to achieve. There are certainly many good crime comics, but not a lot that even come near to successfully capturing the unique chemistry of noir. Perhaps the closest I've seen is MISS: Better Living Through Crime—which, while eschewing any number of the normative elements of the mode, still manages to exude the necessary vibe. Dave Lapham's Murder Me Dead (and to lesser degree Stray Bullets) also falls pretty safely under the noir label—it even has a so-very-noir title. Beyond that, really, I've only so much encountered books that were influenced by noir rather than noir proper. And that's okay.

Jeff Smith's RASL is sometimes billed as sci-fi noir but is really only sci-fi that's influenced by noir. And that's okay. It's okay because, for the most part, the book is really good. And at the end of the day, even if the thing you want more than anything is Billy Madison 2, you're still gonna be pretty happy if you get Last of the Mohicans instead. Apple? Orange? Who cares so long as it's tasty and refreshing.


[If rob had a gun here, one of these men would have bullets in them.]

After Smith tidied up the Bone universe in 2004, he made a brief pit-stop over at DC Comics where he produced a short Captain Marvel story for the company. It was good and it was fine but what everyone wanted was more of Jeff Smith and what his own fertile imagination could concoct. Then Smith began producing RASL and everyone promptly forgot about him. At least so far as anything beyond Bone went. Or at least so far as I was aware. Granted, I'm only vaguely cognizant of anything going on in the comics world, but I do regularly read Greg Burgas over at Comics Should Be Good and occasionally read some of his cohorts at the same site. And I stopped visiting my local comics store a couple years before the first chapter was released. So who knows. Maybe RASL was all the rage and I just never heard about it.

At any rate, I was surprised to find out last November that the series had concluded and was collected in four handsome volumes. I immediately amended my Christmas list and sent RASL right to the top. I needed to see whether the lack of news was justified. After all, Bone turned Smith into one of my (and my wife's) favourite creators. It turned out that I needn't have worried and that even though RASL was merely influenced by noir and not the real deal, it was still pretty great.


[You got your science in my fiction! You got your fiction in my science!
Two great tastes that taste great together!]

One of the most immediately discernible positives about Smith's book is the art. If you were a fan of Bone's illustrations, you'll be right at home in RASL. My young daughter saw me reading the book, looked inside, and asked if it was a new volume of Bone. She's three-and-a-half and she could pick out Smith's style at a glance. He's built the book around the same strong use of positive and negative spaces, the same fine-lined figurework and exaggerated postures. And just like Bone was dominated by beautiful pages, so is RASL—even if the New Mexican desert isn't half so lush as Thorn's Valley.

Like his prior opus, this new work allows Smith to explore the divide between the visible and the spiritual, between the empiric and the elusive. The scientist-on-the-lam hero, Rob, is caught between mysteries his methodologies have a chance at explaining and the myths that roam his world unheeding the requirements of physics or the natural laws. He encounters the god he trusts, Nikola Tesla, through diaries, journals, and academic papers. He blunders into a god he'll never understand through simple acts of providence. Whether he encounters the divine or not is something that Rob is not equipped to discern. And in the end it doesn't really matter. After all, this is a thriller, dammit, and Rob's trajectory and the conventions of his narrative will not allow us to dwell overlong on philosophy or metaphysics.

We can't forget that Smith is modeling Rob's journey on the comfortable formulae so native to the noirish mode. Rob's a dirty angel, but he's our angel. He's morally tarnished (and was so even before he went off the grid to flee a government bent on information and revenge), stealing art and shacking up with a prostitute. He's a man of deep appetites and his use of Tesla-inspired world-skipping technologies only serves to enlarge his antiheroism and needs.


[Hither and come.]

And as much as he's caught between science and spirit, Rob finds himself wedged between any number of other duets. Some abstract, others less so. Tormented by the ghost of a scientist and the ghost of a woman. Crushed between his rational mind and his hungering passions. Full-bodied romance and the stale whiskey of base desire. Selfishness and sacrifice. He's the hooker with a heart of gold, only he's selling his soul instead of his body. He could be a character out of Chandler if only he had a chance with the snappy patter. He's hard-boiled alright, but not much of a talker. He's closer to John McClane than he is to Philip Marlowe.

Still, thankfully, it isn't Smith's occasional nods to noir that won me over so soundly. It was Tesla. It didn't have to be him, exactly. It could have been Marconi or Edison or Lodge or Einstein or Feynman or Curie or anyone, really. But I love it when fictional stories (especially science fictional stories) take members of the historical record and insert them into the novel in a big way. It has to be believable, of course, but I find that when done well these inclusions add an automatic sense of reality to what might otherwise be a wholly fantastic story. And Smith does it well here.


[My tenth grade self is thankful, as there was only so much Twain he could stand.]

Nikola Tesla has, in the past few years, enjoyed a popular renaissance. He's become the scientific hero that primitive man a century ago was too short-sighted to see. For at least the last three-or-so years, content aggregators like Reddit have humped the leg of his ghost and legend so hard that his spirit's got to haunt with a limp now. And RASL comes, coincidentally, at the perfect time for all this adulation. Really, if sites like Reddit need to make a patron saint of a comic book, the book should be RASL, hands down. The man, while seventy-five years dead at the time of Rob's story, is the hero of the book while Rob skulks around as mere protagonist. We follow Rob but our eyes, like his, are always on Tesla. And that's a pretty mighty accomplishment on Smith's part.

The book, for all its wonders, is not without flaw. As he did with Bone, Smith seems to have an aversion to wrapping things up in a way that satisfies. RASL definitely leaves less to the hands of the authors of fan fiction, but there are a couple large questions that remain unanswered. I'm okay with living with the mystery, but at the same time I would have probably been more okay with the solution. But then, perhaps like Rob, I too have less patience for the invisible when there's so much concrete laid out before me.

_____________________

Foot Notes
1) For a long while, video releases weren't intended to go straight to the consumer and were marketed to video rental houses. Purchasing a new cassette (for, say, that colossal bastion of taste and refinement, D.B. Sweeney's and Moira Kelley's rocket to A-list stardom, The Cutting Edge), would cost more than a brand-new game Xbox 360. It wasn't until the early '90s that it became common to see VHS movies released at price points near $20. Which I know because when I wanted to buy Last of the Mohicans, it was like $80 and so brought about my first act of piracy, renting the film and then duping it with a second VCR. Scandalous!

_____________________

[Review courtesy of Good Ok Bad.]

[Brent]

Interesting set up; and the art looks great in a large B&W format on the page.

[N Lopez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am intrigued. Don’t love the macho sin-city
women-stuffed-in-refrigerators vibe of it though. Hopefully it gets more nuanced than that.

[Ren the Unclean · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book seems like it has a lot of potential, but gets off to a stumbling start. It is about a guy who has these jet engines that allow him to travel to different dimensions. This is, obviously, a cool premise, but Smith doesn't really do very interesting things with it (at least in this first volume).

Maybe it is just because this is sort of establishing what is going on with the story, but the story itself is somewhat disjointed. It is fairly action packed, as Rasl is jumping between at least two different universes, but it becomes too heavy too quickly for me to get invested in the characters/story. It would be more engrossing if Smith spent some time with throwaway adventures in the beginning in order to introduce the characters to the reader.

Smith's art style is very good and interesting, but it doesn't work as well here as it does in Bone. He doesn't draw humans as well as he draws more abstract things, and it really shows in this volume.

Overall, it is an interesting book and I will definitely give the second volume a chance, but I am not really sold on it yet.

[Julie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretty slow moving (although there is a lot of "action" - shooting, death, time traveling through alternate world vortexes) for a first installment. I didn't get a good enough sense of the "rules" or understanding of the character to have any interest in reading the rest of the series. It's clear Smith is trying very hard to move beyond Bone, his previous juvenile comic series, but the "adult content" in RASL often feels forced. Shame.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

The long awaited new series by the creator of the popular all-ages Bone chronicles, the mature audiences science fiction tale Rasl centers around the eponymous dimension-hopping thief. Drawn in Smith's trademark clean, cartoony style, Rasl Volume 1: The Drift entertains and thrills while introducing a complex, interesting tale. Sadly, the volume is all too short, leaving the reader unsatisfied and yearning for more of what promises to be an excellent adventure tale.

[Ctgt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Feel in love with Smith reading the Bone series and his style continues here although the subject matter is much more adult. Parallel world jumping, Nicola Tesla, and Smith's line art. What's not to love?

[Meepelous · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very nice balance to the Bone series, Jeff Smith can apparently bring a creative twist to anything.
My only complaints are that it was far too short, and the art style was strangely similar to Paul Pope's though, which was kind of weird.

[Fizzgig76 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reprints Rasl #1-4 (March 2008-April 2009). Rasl is on the run. Robert is a scientist turn thief, but his targets aren’t on this world. He’s created a device to help him jump between dimensions…but the Compound wants the technology that they feel belongs to them. Now a hunter has been assigned to bring Rasl in, and he isn’t afraid to disrupt Rasl’s world or the worlds he jumps to. Rasl is trying to understand the Drift and how to control his abilities, but the Compound won’t allow that to happen!

Written and illustrated by Jeff Smith, Rasl Volume 1: The Drift is a collection of the black-and-white comic book series. The series has been collect multiple times and was even released in color editions.

I read a big chunk of Rasl when it was released. I was a big fan of Bone and read the series straight through, and I wanted to see what else Jeff Smith could do. Along with his take on Captain Marvel in Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil, Rasl shows that Jeff Smith has depth that he still has room to explore.

The story for Rasl starts out as a bit of mystery in this volume. You don’t know the character’s background, you don’t know how he jumps dimensions, and you don’t know the origins of his tattoo “Maya”. The series slowly begin to unveil the answers to the questions, but even in this volume, you do have to wonder what is going on at points.

I really enjoy Jeff Smith’s style. Bone had a weird mix of fantasy character with human characters, and this is primarily set in the human world (though the creepy lizard looking assassin doesn’t look as human as Rasl implies). The world of Bone was clean, pristine, and pretty…Rasl’s world is dirty, filthy, and dangerous. It is nice to see Jeff Smith bridge from his cartoon world, but he still keeps that cartoon style in many ways.

It is important to note that Rasl is completely different than Bone, and it isn’t a kids’ story. This could pose a problem in that the series is being reprinted much like Scholastic reprinted his Bone series. I could see a parent accidentally putting Rasl in front of a kid and the kid immediately having a lot of questions. I would hope that parents would vet things better, but you never know.

Rasl is a series that deserves to be read as a whole, but was pretty enjoyable as individual issues. It wasn’t a simple series and some of the issues were heavy while others were light. It is another in a line of series that proves that comics can be more than superheroes in tights, teens in love, or funny animals. Science meets fantasy and Rasl is the solid result. Rasl 1: The Drift is followed by Rasl 2: Romance at the Speed of Light.

[William O’Pomegranate · Rating 2 out of 5]

So first of all the description is incredibly misleading. Our protagonist is not primarily an art thief. Sure, he does steal art. I happen to chew gum but to call me naught but a gum chewer would be ridiculous. Our protagonist is a guy who's been stealing art to make a quick buck ever since he's been on the run from an evil PMC. This is not a heist book or really about art theft in any way.

The art in this book isn't that great. Our protagonist looks like a neanderthal. Actually, a lot of the characters look like neanderthals. The primary villain looks like a snake monster and while it's briefly mentioned it doesn't carry any weight. I sure would wonder why their snake people exist even if I was able to jump to different dimensions. It's not like any of the dimensions are ever full of anyone except for normal, albeit neanderthal-looking, humans.

Our main character sucks. He's a whiney alcoholic. We learn that in the past he slept with his BFF's wife. This sort of character assassination makes him very hard to like. His current girlfriend is a prostitute that he pays to have sex with. So you know a typical prostitute and not a girlfriend. And yet she's portrayed as having feelings for him. I don't think it works either have her be a sex worker who's having sex with him for cash or have her be his girlfriend. This sex worker with a crush is nonsense and demeaning to sex workers. They can have sex with people and not fall in love with them.

Anyways the one good thing about this comic is it's incredibly short. Not much actually happens in it. So maybe I've judged it too early.

[tony dillard jr · Rating 4 out of 5]

A inter-dimensional art heist. A lizard-faced assassin. Sex. Lies. And Nikola Tesla!

RASL is a book that I've been aware of for a while. Let for some dumb reason, I just wasn't willing to pull the trigger for one reason or another. But then something just clicked and I couldn't overlook it any further.

Man, what a doof was I! The opening chapter to Jeff Smith's physic/crime caper was fantastic! The story was quite good. But it ended too soon! Good thing I was able to head to the library today and pick up the next two volumes.

In terms of the artwork of RASL, it's typical Jeff Smith for me. I love the inking and how clean everything is. But for some reason, he just can't do some faces right. The reptilian baddie is creepy good. But our hero looks like a bobble-head!

There was an old lady in Smith's most popular series, the all-ages friendly Bone. Rose Harvestar! RASL or Robert, depending on who is referring to him, looks like a male version of Rose Harvestar. When he first appears all beaten up and bloody; let me just say that it's not a pretty sight.

An excellent opening salvo of a story. Great art overall with some really terrible faces. But I can overlook it because Jeff Smith has created a universe- no multiverse!- that I want to return to again and again!

[Ambre Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rasl, a dimension-hopping art thief, is being pursued by someone or something in parallel dimensions. It's one thing to have someone gunning for you but a completely different category of unbelievable shite when someone you are friendly with ends up dead after a visit. A Picasso painting has a hole-shaped heart, Annie is dead after she gifted Rasl with a Man in the Maze necklace and now Rasl has no choice but to return to the Drift. Will he discover who the lizard-faced assailant is before anyone else dies? And, what does Bob Dylan have to do with anything?

The three chapters move quickly due to sparse dialogue combined with panels that allow the reader to fill in the spaces between them and co-create the sci-fi narrative. While the storyline sometimes seems like something you've seen in a movie probably in the late 80s or early 90s, Smith manages to keep something fresh and unique. After three quick chapters, I'm ready to buy the next volume. If readers are offended by adult content-drinking, smoking, prostitutes, then best to skip it even though these elements are not overdone. I know, wouldn't it be nice if our starring thief had morals?

[Nigel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rasl is an art-thief, but he has an edge when it comes to staging getaways. Using some distinctive and unwieldy machinery, he can move into other worlds, thereby evading pursuit. It takes a heavy toll, and Rasl self-medicates with alcohol and meditation. Quite why an art-thief would have access to this technology, or why someone with access to this technology would choose to be an art thief, is the central mystery to this comic as it slowly unfolds. Rasl is attacked by a man of bizarre appearance - someone has found him and is determined to chase him down.

This was Jeff Bone's next project after the child-friendly Bone. Rasl is a tougher, grittier, adult work, with sex and violence, drinking and swearing, so don't go giving it to the kids if they're fans of Fone Bone & co. All Smith's skills as a cartoonist are o display, however, lots of silent sequences, natural landscapes and unhurried action. The volume ends with questions left unanswered, and I have the next volume already on order.

[Vittorio Rainone · Rating 4 out of 5]

C'è vita artistica dopo Bone? E' possibile sopravvivere a uno dei capolavori a fumetti di sempre? RASL prova a dimostrarlo. Ritroviamo il bianco e nero e le fisionomie inconfondibili di Smith in una storia che questa volta è un hard boiled fantascientifico. Protagonista tale Robert, alias RASL (questo è il tag che usa per marcare i suoi furti), che in un passato prossimo era ricercatore e ha trovato il modo di distorcere lo spazio per muoversi fra universi paralleli. Le regole del movimento sono ancora piuttosto confuse e il viaggio riserva parecchie sorprese. Nel primo volume le due principali scoperte sono due: (1) lo stanno inseguendo, vogliono lo strano aggeggio con cui viaggia e (2) in tutti gli universi paralleli esistono copie di tutte le persone che conosce, ma non c'è nessuna copia nè di lui, nè del tipo che lo sta inseguendo, deciso verosimilmente ad ucciderlo. Insomma: RASL cerca di non essere bone, e riesce, per ora a fornire una storia davvero interessante. da seguire.

[RSC_Collecting · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn! I can't get enough of Jeff Smith! This was phenomenal. And it has my mind racing. It starts with our main character, RASL. An art thief who can travel to parallel universes. He's met with a strange looking man who tries to kill him. Part of some organization that's hunting him. Already a bunch of mysteries to unravel. We slowly learn more about RASL and of his past. All while asking more and more questions about everything going on. And potentially figuring something out. At least in my case. I think I see a twist coming. And I can't wait to find out if I'm right. Anyway this book is outstanding. One of the best I've read in recent memories. Definitely gonna grab the other two and finish it out. Highly highly recommend!

[Gina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Five stars for the artwork and three stars for the story.

I am biased because I have an ~1000 page volume of the complete Bone stories and I recall devouring them as snow fell in winter and I angled the book away from shadow while in the backseat of a car, etc. *Insert more nostalgia here*

I can mostly read this knowing rat creatures won't sneak up and talk adorably about eating quiche. Mostly--but my brain still expects some adorable and heartwarming and warm-in-general moments.

There is love and creativity, but the story hasn't ensnared me yet. Volume 2, please get me invested in the plot.

[Rick Ray · Rating 2 out of 5]

The story unfortunately does very little to grab my interest. The initial storytelling is quite a bit disjointed and drags a bit. The premise is fairly interesting - who doesn't love an interdimensional heist involving a lizard-faced hitman and some Nikola Tesla sprinkled in for additonal flavor. Jeff Smith even adds some titillating moments, though it does feel a bit out of place given Smith's cartooning style. But unfortunately very little of this grabs my attention and even this volume ends on an interesting cliffhanger, I don't quite feel invested enough to continue reading. Maybe I'll re-evaulate upon a second reading.

[Kara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been a fan of BONE so this was a wild change of pace for me with Jeff Smith's work haha. It's a pretty standard sci-fi noir with gorgeous art. I must admit I found Rasl the character not terribly compelling? Guy just drinks and sleeps around, not really all that much depth to him. I found myself reading this much slower despite the intrigue with the mystery of it all. Still a nice read and again, the artwork makes it worth it.

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The eponymous Rasl steals a Picasso, escapes into another dimension as he's done before — only this time he lands in the wrong place, and someone's pursuing him. There's a lot of set-up here, but very little exposition (a lot of it's by implication) so it never bogs down and I never got frustrated by what I didn't know. A good start to this series.

[Jay Rox · Rating 4 out of 5]

The art on this is really good & story in this first volume starts of like a hardboiled detective story with a lot of whiskey drinking & mistery in a some what sci-fi adventure setting . We got are main character who figured out how to travel to different dimensions because of some of Nikola Tesla old handscrip & secrete organisation is on to his discovery.

[Mikmak · Rating 4 out of 5]

הפתיע לטובה.
סמית' אמר שהסיפור הזה הוא סיפור בוגר שלא בהכרח מתאים לילדים, עכשיו, הוא גם אמר את זה על בון, סיפור שקראתי פעם ראשונה בכיתה ג.
אבל הסיפור הזה באמת מרגיש בוגר ולא מתאים לילדים בכיתה ג, שזה לא דבר רע.
ההתחלה של הסיפור מעניינת והייתי רוצה לראות לאן זה ימשיך.
סגנון הציור של סמית' הוא די קרטוני אז חלק מהציורים (בעיקר החליפה שלו למעבר בין מימדים) נראים די מגוחך

[Celtic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Selling a series with only a single issue is a hard task, particularly where the entire approach is so different from the wonderful Bone, but this does a good job of giving enough hints about the context while getting the action started to make me interested in reading more.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly set-up. Intriguing, but way, way too early to make any definitive statements about the quality of the series. Nice cartooning, but Smith's track record is still a bigger draw than anything on the page.