Review: Runx #2

About a year after the first issue of Runx, Matt Runkle is back with another collection¹ of short, true-life stories with an even larger variety of topics. I must admit I thought it was lighter than its predecessor, but that mostly reflects my interest, or lack thereof, in various subjects: the longest, central piece is about the Ranch dressing, which I’d never heard of previously (I don’t think it’s reached French coasts, but I might be wrong). This story is text-heavy and mostly fact-based, with Runkle’s wry humor present throughout. No doubt his time spent as a waiter has given him the idea of spending half an issue on this rather unexpected subject.

Two other stories are not about the author himself, but about female friends who are, or were, important in his life. The first one is told in the first person by Nora, an old friend of his, and shows her numerous encounters with a shady guy of no stable identity. It’s funny, slightly weird, and drawn in a solid style with dense layouts that made me think of Ariel Schrag’s. The second one is a moving homage to Samantha Jane Dorsett, a transgender woman who seems to have been a formidable presence and who died last summer.

An excerpt from the Farm School story

The fourth story in this issue, and the one opening it, is the one I most enjoyed: entitled “Wrestling with the Truth”, it shows a young Runkle attending a school on a farm, among cowboys and wrestlers, all markers of traditional masculinity in his part of the world. In only five pages, Runkle covers a lot of ground, from his growing self-awareness that he wasn’t comfortable living there–and why–to his budding fantasies about some of his classmates, including what might be called a spiritual experience after having banged his head during a wrestling exercise. But he didn’t see a bearded, old man in the clouds, that’s for sure. Runkle uses yet another art style, halfway between the text/illustration style of the Ranch story and the more conventional storytelling style of Nora’s story. This style where each full page is filled with seemingly meandering textual and visual informations builds for me a reading experience that’s close to the half-dream, half-reality way we often experience memory–in short, it’s very effective in drawing in the reader.

The multiplicity of art and storytelling styles remains for me an important quality of Matt Runkle’s work. The two opening pages, a succession of smaller panels showing his selves sketched in various ways announcing the four stories, work the same way, by presenting us with a kaleidoscope of experiences and memories lived through a queer and questioning prism.

Now that Matt Runkle can be found at his own website, I hope he’ll give us more of his very personal point of views in the form of “visual essays”, as he calls his strips.