3 out of 5

I guess I’m down with movies and books that whip a moral or emotional heart out in juxtaposition to their initial tone, but it’s definitely not something you can just pull the curtain back on like a “twist.”  The reveal of, OMG, here’s the reason this guy or girl is crazy and it’s SERIOUS gets applauded too easily, methinks.  It’s okay to give in to your muse of silliness; it doesn’t always have to have meaning.

After reading Sexcastle, I guess Kyle Starks has difficulty reconciling his bloody, sweary antics with their inherent over-the-topness, needing to imbue them with, like, meaning, or whatever.  In Sexcastle, the lead’s dark background sort of fit with the b-movie vibe, but Rock Candy Mountain had a slightly more loosey goosey, goofy hobo mythology going for it.  Jackson, our deal-with-the-devil lead, was traveling the rails, looking for the homeless holy grail (the titular location), trying to get back to his family, and that’s… sort of all we needed.  There’s a bit more to it – to why he has government agents after him – and I give Starks credit for that plot element as well, because it’s a nice layer of ridiculousness to things, and tosses in a valid plot MacGuffin to boot, but all of this gets mussed by issue 5’s flashback, which is a double-down justification of Jackson’s motivations.  IT’S SERIOUS, BROS.  And I guess I just wasn’t down with that pause in the tone, and I really don’t feel it helped anything, even if Starks was trying to inject more emotionality; the final sequence of events would, I think, have worked equally well without it, if not more effectively for being an unexpected coda.  As is, reframing RCM as something more serious makes the subsequent bloody, sweary, hobo vs. government agents vs. the devil vs. Jackson scuffle significantly less entertaining.  I was amused, but no longer immersed; the page-turning spell had been broken.  And maybe because of that, I was also less enamored with Starks’ art, which, when there are billions of characters flyin’ fists and feets left and right, loses its sense of space.  Narration and art unrooted.

RCM is still, overall, a fun read – and there are enough issues after #5 to moderately settle back into the goofiness of it all – but I hope for Starks to find some way to just pursue his muses without glomming it up with extras; therein, I think, lies the magic ingredients to Schweizer / TenNapel land of affecting, silly stories.