Rasl Volume 2: The Fire Of St. George
This second volume collecting Smith’s post-Bone series, a hard-boiled sci-fi smashup, reveals much of the hero’s backstory. He’s a parallel-world-hopping art thief who not so long ago was a brainiac physicist exploring some of the possibilities buried in Nikola Tesla’s legacy. But now he’s a grim, tattooed bruiser dodging a camel-faced assassin who’s tracking his dimensional jumps. The fractured narrative spins off in some surprising new directions, and Smith’s fluid and precision-fueled cartooning works just as well in these gritty thriller environs as it does in his humor-laced fantasy epic. Sexy, bloody, and more intriguing, impressive, and ambitious by the second. --Ian Chipman