Jean Wei’s Mending a Rift confronts dystopia with intimate simplicity

THIS REVIEW OF MENDING A RIFT CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS.

by Arpad Okay. Undecided if this is a joyous or ominous book. Turn off the lights and the scar left from a mended rift in reality faintly glows. In Jean Wei’s hands, it brings together a group who wouldn’t, for other reasons, have broken bread. But the pale glimmer of a reality scar indicates a bigger problem, a warning light that’s come on. That I want to see one in real life, to touch it with my hands as the mender did, and feel its temperature makes me feel like a moth. Mending a Rift points towards doom with one hand, community with the other, and brings the two together. A prayer for serenity.

The true test of speculative fiction — and, often, good comics — is if the length of a story in pages is smaller than the length of a story in your imagination, and Jean Wei crushes it. Wei’s is a breathtakingly complete world that feels real in every way but the dimension-ripping parts, and it all comes so fast. Very few details, but the right ones. This mini is dense with ideas, but the story is told with quirky, tender brevity. It’s about the folks and how they live in the world; you only get glimpses of the worldbuilding when it intrudes on their lives.

As much as I love sanguine violence, I appreciate that Wei’s Patlabor approach still allows for criticism of the industrial state. There aren’t any mechs in Mending a Rift, but it embraces the idea of broadening “the soldier’s tale” to include other forms of service that don’t bear arms, a more equitable take on labor. We need more working-class comics! Real dystopia is treating the act of mending rips in reality like a business, office protocol and paperwork. Cleaning up corporate spillage. Wei speaks of custodial work doing maintenance and expertise in a trade with the same breath, like tracing the garment industry back to the skill of the seamstress.

We’re thrown into a flawed world via the life of someone whose job is fixing it. Big ideas to think about on your own because the text is focused instead on the sublime tiny details of being. Mending a Rift pairs exceptionally well with Karen Charm’s Fütchi Perf. The rip is worrisome, but the human — and community — spirit perseveres. Community takes a spotlight in the dystopian sci-fi story because community is what gets us out of our current dystopian conundrum. I love the dog. And then the kids and dog? And the kids watching the mending. Also every scene, everybody with everybody.

Science fiction zine art is a seeming contradiction of terms in which books like Mending a Rift thrive. To zine is to make something with nothing, but the portals and ships and various technical apparatus of sci-fi require a budget. Dystopia is science fiction in the red. Weis’ art style is metamodernist, framed around the common experience and expressed with intimate simplicity. The man-made wormholes and the Kafkaesque employment that cleans up afterward fit within the everyday aesthetic instead of clashing with it.

Wei’s indie fluidity is also reminiscent of Dave Mazzucchelli’s Rubber Blankets on asthma. There’s dynamic body language done with a casual, unguarded hand. All the characters fall on the page in natural positions, but how they lie, lift, or even gaze has a living electricity that feels like art. Something as simple as putting on a seatbelt becomes a dance.

What I’m thinking of is early Love and Rockets, the sci-fi prosolar mechanic. The side characters who are just folks around the neighborhood, a scene where everyone eats together. Wei’s art style is drastically different in most ways from Los Bros; Wei uses fewer, heavier lines on top of lots of white and gray, negative space and emotionally robust minimalism. But the body language and super tangible shot framing give the characters that tangible Locas/Palomar presence. The layouts play on the page, using the white space to accentuate the details. When the white is reduced, on top of the gray instead of sitting behind it, Wei’s miraculous techniques shift the mood completely while the “art” remains essentially the same.

Mending a Rift’s strength is in potent, striking moments as much as its sunken concepts. Full of tiny, standout touches, arresting panels. Come for the quirky sweetness, stay for the industrialized dystopia. By the time I began to parse the meaning of the book, the conditions that make “reality repair” a job description, Jean Wei’s ability to paint a scene and write characters I connected with had already drawn me in. I wasn’t searching for meaning, more stumbling across it; Josie, Beni, and Mr. Bingley (that’s the dog) already meant the world to me.

ShortBox / £7.00 / $8.75
Written and illustrated by Jean Wei.

9.5 out of 10

Mending a Rift is available now. For purchasing info, click this.

Check out this 4-page preview of Mending a Rift, courtesy of ShortBox: