1 out of 5

I feel that pacing or tonal issues can be excused when dealing with a translated text, as well as some generally stilted dialogue.  But poor art and an incomprehensibly incompetent story can’t really be explained away by such reasoning.

From afar… like, the cover, ‘Red Ruby’ seems like it’s gonna’ be okay.  Lead character, time cop Mortensen, has a cool time cop costume (which I do appreciate Jakobsen explaining – via his character – as needing to be able to fit in to several eras, and it does work in that way, at least in comic form) of a mouth-obscuring scarf and black cloak, grey trousers, and red… cummerbund?… all of which look pretty nifty when scarf and cloak are a ‘blowin’ in the wind, mussing Morty’s blond hair.  Oh, and time gun – important accessory – which is shaped like a traditional gun but which must be uncomfortably pointed at oneself a billion times, so it’s sort of an odd design scheme.  And I’ll even say that things are acceptable through the ‘foreword’ recap page, although it already contains some narrational WTF’s like ‘the history of our world is being rewritten’ (panel 1) and ‘it is not possible to change your own destiny’ (panel 4) … because apparently time travel limitations only apply to, like, sentient beings.  Now this is assumedly a poorly translated (or written) version of general time travel morality tricks of not being able to cheat fate, but it’s sort of b.s. to make it a ‘rule’ because there’s absolutely no way to bend any logic around that, and it’s great that before the story actually starts we get hints of the mess to come.  But I’ll admit, I accepted it on first pass as a rushed intro.

…That first pass lasted until the end of page one.  We start in ‘The Atlantic Ocean 1937’, where Mortensen is on a ship, playing chess for half the page.  The other half is ‘At the same time in New York…’ for the first of many sub-sub snippets of someone or other’s machinations to get their hands on the fabled gigantic Red Ruby.  (Because ‘your own destiny’ I guess only applies to ‘a beginning and an end’ – again, from the intro – and not whether or not you’re rich and rubied.)   So I looked back to the foreword to see if I had missed some subtext or context about why chess, and why New York, and etc.  Possibly this was in vol. 2.  …But that’s called ‘The Santa Fe Jail,’ and this volume doesn’t end with any kind of branching event… so I imagine it’s just a cold open, one as poorly executed as everything else.

Problems with page one: ‘The Atlantic Ocean’ panels are half in, half out of color.  Why?  You could reason it as a fade-in to the story, but because the pacing of even this page is so fractured, it’s hard to alot Lars any credit for a purposeful device.  Because even if it is a fade in, the panel where we suddenly switch to color is of a character whom never appears again, lending him a sense of in-story importance that lingers until page two, where you’ve doubled your WTF’ness response.  The second half of the page, in NY, sets up a potentially cool idea of splitting several pages between times or places, but that’s completely fucking abandoned, because there’s a pointless shot of the ship again before the page ends.  Why?  WHY?  It accomplishes nothing except to ruin the pacing.  Perhaps this was in like a newstrip format or something and it just didn’t split up for the book properly?  But no, because the drawings extend over panel borders at various points, so the page composition seems purposeful…

Page two introduces the ridiculous transition narration of ‘So…’, which Lars uses as a connector like ‘Meanwhile.’  You see how that doesn’t work, yeah?  ‘So’ implying that one action would lead to another, or connect in some fashion but that’s rarely the case.  Page three: scale issues.  Mortensen, 1/6th of the page, a shot of the boat, 1/8th of the page, Mort, 1/6th, firing his time gun at… the whle boat, 1/12thish of the page… and back and forth and back forth, volleying us between focuses.  It’s not a book that lends itself to splash pages, that’s fine, but some large set pieces (the Titanic, Versailles) never feel like anything more than blips the camera just randomly cuts from scene to scene.  This same problem affects Jakobsen’s ability to create real spaces.  The cover, for example, shows one of the settings from the climax of the book, and upon further inspection (after noting how poorly I understood the design of the setting in the story), the image is, again, telling of what’s between the covers – floating details and a misplaced sense of direction, as Mortensen looks surprised at something off camera that… isn’t there.  Sure, that effect you could say is for the benefit of a cover image (years of ‘looks cool but doesn’t make sense’ Marvel and DC covers to choose from for reference), I’m just pointing out that it’s, in this case, indicative of further design decisions in the actual content.

And around and around.  Scenes never start or end properly on a page, and though Lars’ general character design is pleasing – a nice, sketchily inked cartoonish style with a dash of Tintin-esque ligne claire, the ‘sexy’ female characters look atrocious (so attempts at designing more human features, I suppose) and anything that has to detail sudden changes in movement or action are pretty static.  The tale deals with Mort trying to put the Ruby back where it should be, but it’s a stupidly pointless fucking tale where everyone has a goddamn time gun and ‘it’s a secret’ yet we tell everyone we’re time travelers with a wink and there’s apparently no consequence of jumping around and around and around.  This complete lack of consequence for anything that happens – even some deaths are just brushed off ’cause we’ll just jump back on the wheel for another go, immutable time laws be damned – renders ‘The Red Ruby’ as the most empty of reads.

Which is a shame, ’cause it’s nice that there’s some back matter on the historical context, and despite my nits with Lars’ art style, in general I like the dashed look of things… so it could’ve been a fun, whimsical, sprightly educational history sci-fi thing… but instead it’s just, eh, stupid, and with its complete lack of appreciation for timing or page layout, somewhat of a pain to read as well.