THE TICKING #1

Melancholy Wonder

By Kurt Amacker     January 20, 2006

Renče French's THE TICKING presents an insular, melancholy, yet hopeful world in which a deformed boy named Edison Steelhead struggles to relate to his father. After seeing his wife die in childbirth on the kitchen floor, Calvin Steelhead maintains an emotional distance from his son. His son bears facial deformities similar to his own, yet far worse. Though he clearly loves him, he never quite accepts the boy's malformed, fish-like head, asking him to wear a monkey mask in the presence of company. Later in the story, he takes the boy to a plastic surgeon for an operation that, because of Edison's reluctance, never occurs. All the while the boy, immerses himself in drawing, depicting whatever organic oddities he can find in nature -- insects, vermin, and anything else he can render as an intriguing, beautiful grotesquery. When his father brings home a pet monkey named Patrice, he neglects the boy to spend time with the chimp. At this final act of rejection, Edison leaves home to face the world, deformities and all.

Despite its melancholy beginning, THE TICKING ends on a hopeful detente that I won't spoil. After the heart-wrenching journey, I felt a tinge of relief that Ms. French let me off the hook and didn't send me to bed thinking about life's tragic conundrum. Rather, she engagingly depicts Edison's insular childhood with grace and aplomb, never falling to humor nor cheap ploys for sympathy. Each page has, at most, two panels -- all delicately rendered in black and white with chalk (I think). Ms. French garnishes the tale with sparse, effective dialogue, often relying on images to convey what words simply couldn't.

THE TICKING seems to draw a bit from David Lynch's ERASERHEAD -- as in, what might've happened had Henry raised the evil baby instead of cutting it open like a hot potato. If you enjoyed Kafka's METAMORPHOSIS, I imagine you'll enjoy this. It's weird stuff, but not unwelcome. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

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