Required Reading is DoomRocket’s love chest, opened once a month to champion a book that we adore and you should read. The latest: Griz Grobus, available now from Simon Roy.
by Arpad Okay. Griz Grobus is the MacGuffin of Griz Grobus and The Tale of Azkon’s Heart. That’s not even his name. (It’s Stanley). And as for Azkon, well, everyone knows that one. Love it or hate it, it’s the best-selling book on the planet. Nah, Griz Grobus is about paths crossing and then crossing again, a dangerously adventurous academic and a coy yet capable constable robbing ancient mecha mines. And a little kissing.
This academic, an archeologist, is employed on a colonized planet where the connection to the past has been culturally severed. An alternate earth, providing enough so people can survive on a level capable of studying and even mythologizing their own history. But they’re unaware of their point of origin, the customs before the collapse. (You can’t really call it post-apocalypse if there are literary studies and a publishing market.) She’s unafraid of trouble, drawn to it, which is where that remote marshal himbo comes in. Their story kicks off with chaos in the wake of a successful tomb robbery — the first rebirth of Griz Grobus — and comes back on itself in a much more emotionally satisfying and less loot-fruitful second date.
Why tell the same thing twice? Simon Roy chops up the story, adds a second one, and flips between pages. You get the whole thing, just not in the order you’re used to. It’s a place his readers have been before. The first story was a zine, all of it serialized (and still rolling!) on Webtoon, and its setting mirrors Roy’s world in Habitat, an older title set at a different stage of destruction. His other work, like First Knife, is definitely post-apocalypse; the stakes are more desperate, and the conflicts are bloodier. Things resemble The Tale of Azkon’s Heart more than Stanley’s world in Griz Grobus. Instead of the value of finding relics, this book shines on the value of those who are capable of finding them.
The colonizer culture can bludgeon its way into the terrain, build great halls that will stand (empty) long after their architects return to dust. But the anti-human objectives that propel colonizers into space don’t last. People and communities and life do. Rustic self-sufficience was probably propaganda, not intended to be honored by the corporations that create planetary colonies like the one in Griz Grobus that require off-world labor. But with their influence removed, people have survived together. Life is hard but good.
So, revisionist post-apocalypse sci-fi, from one of the paragons of the genre’s contemporary rebirth. The Image Comics catalog Simon Roy has built and contributed to seems to need dead bodies to tell tales. That’s not this. Griz Grobus is the kind of Patlabor universe I dream of having more books be about, where the mechs were purposed for building instead of destruction. Give me an alternate future that doesn’t kill everybody.
Roy’s art style is in that plum-perfect Chris Samnee zone, minimalism with weighted substance, only Simon has way more doodle power: simultaneously loose and tight. Figuratively focused, nice cartoony people with a lot of character and distinctive style tied to the setting. Nice settings. Instead of war machines tearing everything up, the detail enlivens a pastoral backdrop. The overgrown structures from a lost culture that the archeologist likes to tomb raid are where the Weyland-Yutani brutalist industrial sci-fi design comes in. The mechs are for terraforming mountains and perennial forest biomes, tank treads and winch arms, as well as power stations and community moral guidance. Or they were, before they were unplugged and left to time’s devices.
Griz Grobus is someone who can draw MechWarrior robots, choosing from a world where some exist, maybe, in museums or the hands of universities. Filed under “How the heck did these work.” Like Jean Wei’s Mending a Rift, Griz Grobus focuses on other roles besides soldiers, whose stories are as lively and captivating as those concentrated on killing. But they’re still told in the shadow of a military-industrial complex grown to capitalist, cataclysmic proportions.
What you’ve got is essentially Phillip K. Dick food manga. What kind of stories center an agricultural society? A feast day is disturbed when a tenured zealot for corporately developed superfood crashes the fête. Rival raiding parties are united in hunger as well as the nature of their work. The most popular book on the planet sees a goose become a war god heralded by a pacifist chef! However, the fall of the establishing civilization came to pass; it was a favor to those who survived it, out in the low-priority reaches of space.
Griz Grobus is available now. For purchasing information, contact your local comic shop. To read this on Webtoons, click this.
Self-published / C$50.00 / $36.65
Written by Simon Roy and Jess Pollard.
Illustrated by Simon Roy.
Colored by Sergey Nazarov.
Edited by Jess Pollard.
Print Layout by Simon Roy and Kathryn Renta.
Check out this 2-page preview of Griz Grobus:
More Required Reading:
Iggy Craig’s Sad Girl Space Lizard is honest-to-goodness porno-mech comics
Nicole Goux crafts captivating tales about clutter and clamor in Rituals
Witchy teen detectives let emo sparks fly in Sas Milledge’s Mamo
