"Another foggy day in this old town
Hidden by the mist that's all around
[...]
I sail through clouds and float on silver skies
The world's a nicer place from up on high"
Oi Va Voi - Foggy Day
I've been perusing various of Ralph Hayes Junior's comics over the past weeks (there are quite a few of them) and at least the newer ones are worth a mention. As for the older ones... well, given the author officially introduces himself as a Christian from Ohio, you can more or less guess at their sophistication.
Tallyho, basically a lot of Mr. Magoo jokes in dog form, looks strictly inspired by newspaper comics, with the dull, conventional humor that implies.
Goblin Hollow starts with the idea of an arcade inhabited by goblins, but after only two dozen pages abruptly shifts into reactionary rambling against a goth teenager, and from skimming the next hundred pages it mostly just kind of... stays there.
Camp Calomine fares better as the adventures of children's summer camp counselors whose camp has been taken over by politically correct fanatics, with quite a few cathartic jabs at the past decade's moralistic fads. Still, it ignores the more important context that children's camps and youth groups have always been used for
indoctrination, whether officially or just because certain segments of
the population are motivated to abuse them as such. Officially your
kneebiters are going to learn some survival/crafts skills, have fun in nature or spend their Sunday
playing. Really, they're going to be used as unpaid manual labor and/or
be indoctrinated into a bunch of superstitious garbage about national exceptionalism, the
glorious proletarian utopia, or some sadomasochistic eschatological cabal touting bimillennial visits from a zombie rabbi.
Or then there's The Probability Bomb, a crossover between his newest comics (and abandoned before them) which appears to have rapidly devolved to a confused, foaming-at-the-mouth screed against infidels as space nazis out to destroy the universe... or something.... which is obviously far worse than worshipping an imaginary magic sky-daddy who's out to destroy the universe and torture almost everyone (except those "better" people who obey him) for all eternity...
Still, with time, R.H. learned a few tricks of the trade and the strips loosely defined as currently "active" (within the last year) can be counted among the internet's better fare. Tales of the Questor has young Quentyn, son of Quinn, an adolescent magic raccoon in a generic fantasy world, take up the mantle of adventuring hero. The spin-off Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger is basically that IN SPAAAACE! as a slightly more grizzled version of Quentyn spoofs and deconstructs a few SciFi staples like space pirates or Star Trek's monolithic Federation culture or its draconian Prime Directive and murderclonomat abuse, and manages a couple of more original plot elements in the process.
Both versions earn much of their charm by the protagonists' earnestness. Whether interacting with his family&friends, rooting out crime or injustice, saving innocents, solving historic mysteries or braving the great unknown, Quentyn is always so ingenuously given unto the task he's chosen for himself that he can't help but infect the audience with his heroics. The same attitude carries into the larger story, as RH is one of the few remaining authors not to take phrases like "I cast fireball" for granted, and tries to work through the cognitive and sensory implications of various scenes involving magic or industrial era "magic" tricks, helping a great deal to expand upon otherwise simple characters intrepidly braving their odd little fantasy realm rendering even trivial episodes rather visceral. Some of the scenes pitting the core cast, with their core values, against modern-style fad worship and the excesses of social science can be downright cathartic.
Other scenes... well... RH, though evidently not particularly stupid by nature and despite all his hard-won storytelling aptitude, is also a prime example of the brain damage inflicted by a conservative upbringing. He builds up each story rather sanely until overtaken by some spastic need to re-affirm his flyover deadhead credentials and starts shouting BRING BACK THE GOLD STANDARD! Or, you're accelerating through an otherwise well-executed dramatic scene until BAM! - full-page psalm! Or here's a ten-page glossy digression about a random bullshit merchant for no particular reason. Or an anti-evolution argument so primitive (random atoms spontaneously coalescing into dinosaurs) that any third-grader with a sedimentary pet rock and geologic era timeline chart could correct it effortlessly.
Like other libertarian pamphleteers the sheer heft of naive conviction he throws into his anti-socialist rants is a thing to behold, as on page 136 of Space Ranger: "even the most corrupt robber baron must, at least, stay profitable or his empire perishes" but "a government bureaucracy [...] when the decision makers neither pay out of their own pocket for their ideas, nor suffer any consequences when they fail" is the only "place where incompetence can flourish indefinitely". Anyone who has worked for a large company can confirm it is its own government with its own bureaucracy, every bit as inefficient as those of nations. I myself can cite examples of being raked over the coals as a temp whenever something went wrong, because my bosses preferred to waste half a shift every time interrogating me rather than risk bad blood among their peers by asking even a single uncomfortable question up and down the supply chain. Let's not even mention the endless inter-department squabbling over who signs for what box and who get an extra cartridge of printer toner next quarter. Incompetent managers do persist decade after decade for not threatening their peers' status or simply kissing ass and as for staying profitable, well, you have to ask profitable to whom? The wealthy as a rule do not pay out of their pockets for mistakes. They pay out of their customers' and employees' pockets. Even in case of catastrophic failures, golden parachutes have been standard equipment for some decades. Even if they manage to collapse an entire economy, the rich can easily bail on their private jets to their private islands to prey upon the next economy, being always more mobile and able to weather bad times out of their accumulated fat while the lower classes scrape and starve to rebuild a region until they become profitable enough to be harvested once again.
How can cowboy fetishists have completely forgotten Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary?
CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit
without individual responsibility.
- and while we're at it -
RELIGION, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the
nature of the Unknowable.
Yet still, even if you're not just flipping through for the freakshow value of the author's bouts of reactionary mania, there's something undeniably charming about Quentyn Quinn, that primitive/primitivist naivete clinging to the blind belief that if only given a chance heroes will arise, wrongs will be set right, the truth will out and better days shall dawn.
Pluck, baby, it's all about the pluck!
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