Required Reading is DoomRocket’s love chest, opened once a month to champion a book that we adore and you should read. The latest: All Talk, available now from Black Panel Press.
by Arpad Okay. In the year 2023, the pulp tradition of crime perpetrated by idiots is still cooking. There’s no drama quite like a small-time crook biting off more than they can chew. All Talk is about gangster aspirations. It’s called a come-up when it’s pulled off. Unfortunately, Rahim and his friends might sell drugs and hang out on the same corner as a kingpin, but they aren’t really actual criminals yet. Rahim is more of a dreamer.
Bartosz Sztybor has written a local news crime story for Akeussel to illustrate. The game’s outcome for some is tragic, truly, but their story isn’t making any national outlets. Maybe the paper. Maybe not. The big-fish/little-pond aspects of All Talk bring to mind Declan Shalvey’s magnificent Irish family gangster tale, Savage Town. Surprisingly, there are more tracksuits in Limerick City than in Berlin. Both stories hinge on crime but bank on personality over action. Both are Shakespearean problem plays, where the tragedy is real and without restraint, but so is the comedy. The buoyancy of authenticity lifts the story up into something more than a genre piece.
All Talk’s tall tales of the stoop brew up big aspirations in Rahim, a reverie the reader gets a peek at. The legendary OG Immortal Al is taking slugs, spitting fire and sly remarks, and the film quality in Rahim’s mind is pure monochrome grindhouse. His rose-colored glasses are headphones, and it’s Bobby Womack playing in the cans. Who’s the man standing on the corner, the bad mother no one even thinks of crossing? Spoiler alert: not Rahim.
The focus (outside of Rahim’s head) on the domestic setting over the spectacle of crime lands the book in an aesthetic place more John Lurie than James Bond. Akeussel’s art is kind of like what Loïc Locatelli-Kournwsky did with Persephone: flat and made more from distinct shapes than anatomy and accuracy. But way more minimal, much closer to Joann Sfar’s YA series Sardine in Space. Real spare work. The panels often have nothing in them but the person speaking, calling up zine art and diary comic aesthetics. The underground comix equivalent of a docu-drama.
The colors add a fullness that amplifies the lines. The sunset ceramic glaze used on the Black Panel Press edition’s cover carries through practically the whole book. The visuals become heartier without any texture clouding up the linework. Less is more. The details are there when you need them, though. The corner outside the bodega is a moment where the set matters as much as the actors. Catch the La Haine poster on the wall during the actual heist. Rahim lives in a world. Ours? One with dimension.
But the goal for Sztybor and Akeussel isn’t realism. There’s a playfulness frame to frame that’s like Jim Mahfood. A love for notebook graffiti aesthetics brought into comics. Besides the depictions within the panels being way more cartoony than representational, there are regular breaks from panel-driven storytelling altogether. All Talk pulls fun sequential art techniques uncommon to collaboratory comics. The heist is interpolated with the screen of a mobile phone, playing the snake game. The approach feels like something from a movie, but the execution as a comic has a uniquely satisfying rhythm.
Also very filmic — and like something from the graf book instead of derived from a comic script — is the book’s dedication to giving single lines their own moments. There are arguably intertitles in All Talk. Like Chris Ware. The majestic “OH SHIT!” is a real treat. Celina Bernstein did the translation, and I assume the lettering; I appreciate the level put in to replicate Akeussel’s original flourishes.
The communication between Sztybor and Akeussel to get such an authentic zine cartoonist effect is impressive. Their understanding of what sequential storytelling is capable of makes for a comic that’s more than a progression of panels yet still seamless. At the same time, approaching the story beat by beat makes for sharply executed humor. Cutaways and inserts bring the mood to the forefront of the moment. Banter back and forth becomes a sequence, a dance, turns in chess.
It’s a game. Just watch your back, player.
There have always been gangsters. All Talk claims to be a warning, but I think it understands too much to be something so bleak. Ask Wallace from The Wire about the justice “play with fire, get burned” serves. The story Sztybor, Akeussel, and Bernstein are telling is about stories. What we romanticize. Both Rahim and the reader. Making it a story so much about a real kid creates a conflict impossible to ignore. I’m forced to reconcile how much I enjoy stories like All Talk with the dark places they ultimately lead their characters.
All Talk is available now. For purchasing information, click this.
Black Panel Press / $29.99
Written by Bartosz Sztybor.
Illustrated by Akeussel.
Translated by Celina Bernstein.
Check out this 5-page preview of All Talk, courtesy of Black Panel Press:
More Required Reading:
K Briggs’ shimmering Macbeth adaptation is an utterly unique reading experience
Griz Grobus is doodle-powered post-apocalypse from Simon Roy
Iggy Craig’s Sad Girl Space Lizard is honest-to-goodness porno-mech comics
