Dedication: For Sal
and for Dean and black coffee
I first met Fabian Rangel Jr. and Alexis Ziritt’s Space Riders not long after my wife and
I split a delicious crepe drizzled with honey and walnuts and stuffed with
ricotta. I had just read another duller than the dullest dull corporate comic I
won’t bother to talk about, except it had something to do with some miserably
weary ‘secret’ something and my feeling that everything about superheroes i.e.
corporate properties nowadays really does make me feel dead inside. With the
coming of Space Riders began the part
of my life you could call my life on the road to gutters filled full with faux
smudges, ersatz water stains and all Ziritt’s phantasmagorical ribbons of red,
orange and green exploding like spiders across the stars and all that crackle,
crackle, crackle; and Rangel Jr.’s tale of an anthropomorphized mandrill first
mate by name of Mono, Yara whose half Fritz Lang and half Hajime Sorayama
and all hip-swinging-karate-kicking gynoid and, course, Capitan Peligro, a
dangerous sort, duh, the son of the “toughest
son of a bitch in the galaxy,” wielder of the Ghostmaker and enemy to
Vikers and space whalers everywhere. Whither goest thou, Capitan, in thy tiny shiny
skull ship, thy Santa Muerte in limitless space as black as the morning’s
coffee as “black and [as] infinite?” Where goest thou? Space Riders #2 proves one-eyed beardy boys
and green-skinned-magenta-haired alien warrior girls with
Genesis-era-Peter-Gabriel-style makeup in America and across all the universe have
such a sad time together when they must part because he’s a Space Rider and
she’s a wizard; but oh, my dingledodies, my mad ones, that kiss, that kiss,
that kiss they share it burns, burns, burns in madder red and salient saffron,
her hand on his hirsute cheek, their lips in ferocious symmetry of questions
unanswered—EE-YAH! EE-de-lee-YAH! Ey-y-y-y-y-es—oh Donna Barbara you space
wizard and speaker of Enna-ish, you, you protectress of strange wonderful
tribal creatures of wherever. Rave on. Rave on. Rave on! Rangel Jr. is the HOLY
GOOF, a con man of comics who writes like an old tea-head of time. See how he
takes what’s in those old musty dusty moldering stacks of memories and youthful
indiscretions so fraught with the efforts of the imagination injection machine,
the ones found in four color panels and now only safely held by the white
cotton gloves of some sub-sub-sub-librarian in basements and morgues? You know,
all the ones to Flagg, those
old serials filled with head hurling super wizards and mystery woman of the jungle,
right (?) the one with the bedroom eyes who becomes the fearsome and
not-to-be-fucked-with skull-faced Fantomah? How he, I’m talking about Rangel
Jr. here, loops and grooves and riffs to create the mimesis of mimesis of the
infinite? See how he stands astride the heaps of pulpy comics stacked like
cordwood, stands there with outstretched palms hovering over keyboard like those
old monks in their cells with ink pot and pen who stave off ‘the’ plague as
they bend to their illuminated manuscripts? Rangel Jr. wrestles this vortex of
madness to a draw enough so as to let it live on its own. He does not tame, he
acts and encourages and all that stuff, stuff, stuff that wonderful stuff is
his medium. With him it’s all “sure, baby, mañana,”
and I shamble after as I’ve been doing all my life after writers and madmen who
interest me, on to the next issue, the next fix— mañana, a lovely word and one that probably means creator-owned
comics. And Ziritt? Ziritt is a God lashed to the drawing table or the cintiq undulating
through the infinite like great an-anu herself in all her dreaming, her
munificence. Those thick ink lines so supple they roll and roil like the
Susquehanna in the wilderness of the American spring. Ziritt’s pencils, inks
and colors are, as Yara puts it about a ship the crew encounters, a ship, a
space station of sorts, perhaps, in the shape of a seated robot like great wise
Solomon himself, a robot composed of all the best parts of Force Five --
Grandizer, Gaiking and Dangard Ace -- Yara sez, “that design … is beautiful.” Here is a cartoonist who knows what he
likes. Ziritt’s figure work looks like the drawings of that one kid in high
school who would fill pages upon pages of blue-ruled notebook paper with space
ships, astronaut guys, and aliens with skulls encased in helmets or with the
heads of wolves or pyramids while I wept for that seer and pig-palaver-ist
Simon, killed by machismo, chaos and sharp sticks. I always envied those talented
kids, kids like Ziritt who could slip the bonds of High School English class
and light out for worlds of their own non-Lucas-ized imagining. Ziritt brings Space Riders its intestinal fortitude,
its balls. Those fools of consistency and continuity, those hobgoblins of
little minds who take the name of Kirby in vain as if it’s some truth-telling
device, some test, a buffet the enlightened use to wave away whatever bits of
golden age knowledge crosses their transom. Oh those sad, sad-eyed fanboys who
will never understand … Ziritt does not draw for them or for Jack Kirby or for
the heavy holy trinity of Maroto, Moreno and Lindell … he draws for himself,
for Ziritt. So in America when the “class
5 tractor beam” pulls us all into the mouth of a giant seated robot
spaceship-thingy and I sit at the old broken-down re-purposed cubicle watching
the long, long lines of MCU sheep at the Cineplex and sense there is something
more in all the primary color and paper that rolls onto the shores of the LCS
week-to-week in one unbelievable huge bulge we call Capital-C Comics, and all
that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, of comics and
what they hold, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear, and ol’ Rangel Jr.
and Ziritt? and nobody knows what’s going to happen next to our heroes now
captured by those robots with their glowing green wire-frame heads and smoke
streaming from round eyes like newly made bullet holes, I think of Space Riders, I even think of old
Hammerhead the first mate we haven’t found (yet) I think of Space Riders.
---
Space Riders #2 is
available May 13 at fine retailers in America and elsewhere. Space Riders #1
and #2 can also be procured in both physical and digital manifestations direct
from Black Mask Studio.
Keith Silva rereads On
the Road in what Eliot sez is the cruelest month. He writes about comics and
pop culture. Such endeavors have made him an inveterate caffeine addict with an
increasing taste for stronger vices like Kentucky bourbon and single malt
scotch. He does not need his hand held unless it’s by his wife or daughters. @keithpmsilva
