Inks And Colors Rescue ‘Blue In Green’ From Plodding Plotting

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If you were to liken traditional cartoons to classical music, RK’s drawings might be analogous to jazz. His fuzzy edges and blotches of ambiguous color are as far as you can get from the simple lines and flat tones associated with traditional comics, and his approach to drawing faces is anti-iconic. His characters all start as unstable, foggy sketches, as if you’re seeing them through the hazy air of a smoky club. RK gives you one or two features to identify characters from panel to panel, but otherwise their faces are usually obscured with crosshatching and melty at the edges. It’s as if he’s saying, «You’re going to peg this person by their glasses/nose/hairstyle, so what’s the point of filling in the rest? How will you decide you’ve really seen them?» Since Erik and many of the other characters are black, RK’s approach can also be read as a rebuke to the racism of classic comics. By refusing to boil his characters down to one or two iconic features, he forces the reader to confront a whole range of assumptions about what people are supposed to look like.

RK references jazz in other ways, too. His compositions, angles and graphical effects echo the work of advertising illustrators in the heyday of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. (The title of this book is taken from a Davis song.) He often leaves faint gridlines on his pages, alluding to the rigid laws that invisibly undergird jazz improvisation. Pearson expands the typical noir palette, lavishly pouring out saturated hues of hot pink, throbbing coral, electric purple and sunshine yellow. The only time the artists stumble is when they depict the evil spirit Erik meets (it looks like something from a Halloween attraction) and Erik’s psychotic break. It’s as if Ram’s plodding story beats are throwing them off their rhythm.

Still, RK and Pearson launch a fascinating, layered, exploratory flight off of Ram’s trite composition. They make Blue In Green worth checking out. Let’s just hope they didn’t have to sell their souls to do it.

Etelka Lehoczky has written about books for The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The New York Times. She tweets at @EtelkaL.