Review: Great Deeds Against the Dead #1 by Rob Jackson

GREAT DEEDS AGAINST THE DEAD #1
Rob Jackson
www.robjacksoncomics.com

The main problem with faux-naïve art is that one is never quite sure just how “faux” it all is, or what the purpose is behind intentionally creating something that looks like it was tossed off by a mildly talented third-grader. That’s certainly the case with Rob Jackson’s puzzling work, which feels like it owes a great debt to both genuine “outsider artists” like Rory Hayes and underground primitivists like Mark Beyer. And also, maybe, a debt to real children’s drawings, since Jackson has some of that silly, off-kilter imagination running through this goofy ghost story. Unfortunately, Jackson’s work also shares with children’s drawings a certain stiff dialogue style that will be instantly recognizable to anyone who’s ever looked at drawings or comics done by kids: an overabundance of wordy exposition and pointless exchanges of pleasantries. It’s probably a conscious choice, of course, but that only raises the question of why anyone would want to consciously limit their aesthetics in this way.

This all adds up to a very weird and uncertain experience; it’s hard to know what to make of this compact little book. Great Deeds Against the Dead is slated to be a two-part series, of which this is the first part. It’s about an aging artist named Tisdale Carnegie, who becomes a recluse after his wife’s death. He moves into a possibly haunted house where he makes paintings of his wife, who then talks to him through them. The comic vacillates between sections of compelling creepiness, genuinely hilarious non-sequiturs and tiresome amateurishness. The art too is wildly variable. Sometimes Jackson scrawls at a level not too far removed from stick figures, while at other times he achieves something of the raw-nerve energy communicated by Beyer and Hayes. Often, these sequences come when he deviates from the four tiers of cramped little panels that dominate the book’s layout. When he allows an eerie, black-heavy drawing of Carnegie’s house to stretch across the entirety of two tiers at the bottom of one page, it’s a haunting image. Similarly, there’s a sequence of three elongated panels where the house is subtly anthropomorphized, acquiring a set of glaring eyes and a hungry mouth.

Jackson’s drawings of people are less compelling, and when he tries to cram multiple characters into the same frame it only reveals his lack of feel for perspective, proportions or body language — a lot of his compositions are neither realistic nor appealingly stylized. Adding to the puzzlement is a silent back-up story with a very different, ultra-realistic style, seemingly photo-traced, with some nice shading and textural effects. Obviously, there’s more to Jackson than the unpolished style of the main story here would suggest, though even this second story doesn’t offer much of substance. What the main story does have, though, is an undeniable charm in certain absurd flourishes, like a funerary statue that enfolds a couple of hapless victims in its winglike arms, or the psychic who hands out a business card with three eyes spread across its face. These charms aren’t quite enough to overcome the tone-deaf dialogue and often-awkward art, but it’s something at least.