Resurrection Rachel: Orbit of the dead

Today in the “Book Gurry” we will consider one of the best indie comics in the 2010s, namely the first volume of the “Rachel Resurrection”-a hybrid of a mystical thriller and a female detective, stuffed with biblical allusions, witches and a spirit of mormalness in the air, in which monochrome, ghostly and even hypnotic visualization seems to be an obvious solution.

Who is the author?

Being a pioneer of Indie Pablining, publishing his series in his own tiny publishing house " Abstract Studios ", Terry Moore was nevertheless awarded the prestigious awards of the comics of the Kharvi and Icener. Mr. Moore is almost a cult author, largely thanks to the epic comics-saga “Strangers in Paradise” , the scientific and fiction arch “ Echo ” and the mystical thriller “Resurrection of the Rachel”, which will be discussed.

Like Charles Burns, he writes and illustrates his plots. Moore is called Alfons Fly of the World of Comics, and its drawing is distinguished by the accuracy of lines and photography: static, the rule of the golden section and the line introducing into the "frame" of the line. Moore creates not highly detailed, but greedy comics, where each important phrase or significant symbol can slip away from the reader, but after a few hundred pages will be patiently selected and developed by the author.

Where does everything happen?

The main character of the Rachel Resurrection comes to his senses in a shallow grave in the forest and realizes that he was strangled, but for some reason is not dead in the full sense of the word. Unraveling a ball of mysterious causes and events, Rachel is drawn into the investigation of black masses, the Witches of the City of Manson and in the pursuit of Zoe's girl - a vessel of powerful evil forces. The background is the coming of a mysterious white witch, the following mor and the general resurrection of the dead.

What is it about?

Despite all visibility, the horror "Resurrection of Rachel" can be called a very big stretch. Rather, it is a tanatological thriller interspersed with mysticism and elements of the detective. Moore concocted not another banal region about the rebellious dead - his message is completely different. Nevertheless, the main, though invisible character is death itself, and not Rachel. Here death is rather a subject than a state, and the position of Rachel, if explainable, is more metaphysically than from a biological point of view. A small town of Manson (of course, connected by one umbilical cord with silent hill) turns into an endless orbit, the intersection point of the deceased. Nevertheless, Moore took up the difficult work: to be on the side of the dead, hold their hand and try to go again with the paths with them.

The author created a static, leisurely comic. However, leisurely-not the same as the lack of being: every thirty-forty pages someone dies a terrible death or, on the contrary, reluctantly resurrects. In this quiet, muffled presentation of death, it seems, the main dissonance consists.

What is noteworthy “Rachel Resurrection” is a characteristic humor of a pathologist - like, for example, Dr. Frank Hart in Golgof John McDonakh. The dead Moore are cynical and not a bit happy with the “second chance”, and it turns out, as in an old saying: “They don’t let them live - and they don’t allow to die.”

And of course, Terry Moore would not be himself if in this graphic novel did not make the main characters women. In all his main works, men are inappropriate, episodic and break into the narrative with a rare dotted line. So here we have a somewhat brutal, decisive and sharp on the language of the “zombie” in a skirt. And death to her face.

What is it like?

To the literature on tanatology, Bardo Thyol , the Egyptian book of the dead , the Witches of the Grimoer , the detectives of Robert Chambers - and at the same time any of the above.