Published by Retrofit Comics and Big Planet Comics in 2014.
. . .
"It's a love story, sir, so brace yourself."
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
In a black and white future, dogs of shadow and light chase a film director's limousine across a simplified landscape just on the border of a great metropolis and a blank-inducing wilderness. Maybe the wilderness is so obliviating because the humans and clones and animal-headed people in this story can no longer see past a world of media and celebrity and paparazzi and trendchasing.
The film director's driver/bodyguard is a burly clone named Harold, who wears a weird little mask over his mouth. Harold and his fellow clones all look the same-same mask, same burliness, same shaved heads with a tuft of hair on top.
I mentioned the animal-headed folks-those are the paparazzi. I think they might be jackal-headed, and/or dog-headed, and/or donkey headed, or some chimerical mixture of the three. If this were an Enki Bilal comic, I would assume them to be Egyptian deities of yore, fallen out of the heavens, and cursed to work sleazy jobs upon the dusty Earth.
Harold and his boss park outside of a luxury hotel, waiting for the boss's wife to check out, when animal-headed paparazzi swarm the area. These pictorial scavengers are looking to get photos of a princess who is staying at the same hotel, no doubt looking vaguely pinched and resentful-kinda like the thousands of photos of skinny Los Angeles-based actresses looking deeply skeeved-the-fuck-out as they are surveilled going to and from the gym that get uploaded to Instagram.
The film director doesn't know anything about the princess or the past history of this black and white world, and so Harold obligingly enlightens him. There was once a King who lived in a fancy house atop an unlikely hydraulic lift-think of a fantasy residence pitched between Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky and Edgar Figaro's Burrowing Castle from Final Fantasy VI-that could be activated to elevate the royal family above the unwashed masses. Civil war breaks out below. The King strikes a neutral stance, and allows the lower compound to serve as a hospital for Royals and Rebels alike. The King's daughter-the Princess-desires escape from her gilded cage and contact with gritty reality. Therefore, the Princess descends to be among the tumult and gore of the people's uprising . . .
Harold is a comic of about 60 pages that uses what Scott McCloud would probably describe as a 'decompressed cinematic' style. We flow smoothly to and from the pursuing dogs of shadow and light, and the pages are sequenced to give the feeling of moving our imaginary camera in and out of large-scale setpieces, featuring swarms of animal-headed paparazzi, and the flashback involving the fanciful hydraulic mansion.
The story encompasses a vast, bloody history . . . that is seemingly of little interest to the movers and shakers of this world. The paparazzi and the media beast whose maw they feed are only interested in the surface glamor and voyeuristic sex appeal that can be extracted and/or manufactured from taking photos of the Princess. The film director-another kind of content producer-is also indifferent to history. He is a wealthy creative impatient to get from Point A to Point B.
As for Harold . . . well, he is a mere driver, and a bodyguard-a clone, at that. We see a gang of his fellow clones run interference on behalf of the Princess at one point.
This is all the work that's left to be done in this world. Creation of vacuous distractions from the weight of history. Playing the role of a celebrity to be vampirized by the image hungry media beast. And the body guarding clones who act to ration out the vanishing table scraps to the image jackals.
But Harold's here. Trying to keep the history alive.
Here's to Harold.
