Making its jump from online to print, Farel Dalrymple’s “It Will All Hurt” is a bizarre, trippy, sometimes goofy, sometimes disturbing post-apocalyptic fantasy adventure. Those who have read Dalrymple’s 2014 graphic novel, “The Wrenches,” should know what’s in store for them. Everyone else: get ready for an experience.
Written and Illustrated by Farel Dalrymple
“It Will All Hurt” is a weird, sad, silly, and sketchy, fantasy adventure strip with magic and science-fiction and some fighting action. “IWAH” is one of the coolest science-fantasy adventure comics you will ever read. It’s also a companion piece to Farel’s amazing and beautiful graphic novel, The Wrenchies. A Study Group Comics production.
Originally serialized at Study Group Comics (which, seriously, continuously puts out some the neatest comic work anywhere, web and stands), “It Will All Hurt” centers around a young girl named Alemendra, wandering lost in this expansive, dangerous landscape. She doesn’t remember much of where she came from beyond odd flashes of small creatures. She has this constant feeling of deja vu and can turn into animals. She has the feeling that she should be looking for something, although Alexandra isn’t honestly sure what that might be yet. In the meantime, she’s intervening on behalf of anyone in trouble she comes across, fighting monsters, and doing her best to make her way out.
The book also features an alien astronaut in orbit, researching some colorful orbs or something, when their spaceship falls under attack from Shadowsmen, who literally climb off the planet to attack the spaceship, and they are forced to make a last second escape planetside. There’s also a young boy who wanders into empty buildings — an old, haunted school in this case — and controls elements of the environment with music. There’s an older, hunched over bald dude who’s a doctor, maybe?, but who mostly spends his time wandering around, observing everything. And there’s a cat named Gato Gris.
This post-apocalyptic fantasy world is the same place Dalrymple explored in “The Wrenchies.” Although that book and this one are companion series, I don’t think you necessarily need to read one to understand the other. There’s a whole world over here, leaving plenty to explore. Indeed, the parts of the place Dalrymple chooses to focus on in this book feel different and new compared to the places he featured in “The Wrenches.”
Eventually, Alemendra has a vision and decides to go on a quest to stop the angry Sword Wizard, who’s causing all sorts of problems in his far-off realms. You get the feeling that all the characters she meets or whom Dalrymple focuses on throughout this book will eventually join her on this quest, but that’s not important. The quest itself isn’t important; that’s not what this story is about.
Just like how “The Wrenchies” was used to explore these metafictional themes and motifs, the adventures in “It Will All Hurt” exist more for Dalrymple to explore the poetry of the comics medium. Everything, from the characters to the action to the montages, is used to sort of show off the textual/visual interplay of graphic storytelling and the strange relationship we have with the text. Take, for instance, the Sword Wizard: none of his powers are nearly as cool as the way Dalrymple presents them, with his match transitions and uneven panelling. Characters sometimes speak with balloons, and sometimes they’re captions like in a single-panel strip. There isn’t a straight line to be found in pretty much the entire book, and it gives you this really cool jittery and rhythmic feel reading this.
Dalrymple is an uninhibited, stream-of-conscious, and practically improvisational cartoonist. His line work is sketchy, with this sometimes almost unfinished quality to it, as if he was in a rush to move on to the next panel because the action there needed to be rendered immediately. He uses a dulled and desaturated watercolor palette that’s somewhat unsettling and not that pretty when you’re flipping through this. His panels follow a 2×3 grid, until he doesn’t want to anymore, and the visual information is often sparse. But this is a dude who’s perfectly in control of the work he’s presenting: he knows how to control the pace and tempo of the reading. He knows when we need to be bombarded with setting versus when we can just infer what else is going on in the background. He knows what colors to choose to absorb you and make this the only thing that exists for you at that moment. He knows to put more emphasis on the character designs and every single figure he focuses on has their own distinguishable look brimming with a history he only infers. The frame is what you’re seeing, but there’s so much more going on beyond the frame.
Continued belowSure, Dalrymple can be challenging but that’s only because he’s constantly demanding your attention. At the same time, he’s ridiculously rewarding, whether it be from delivering a particularly well done kinetic sequence (there’s a pit battle in this that’s ace) or a really good joke or just some interesting way he presents a scene. It’s easy to say that he’s subverting genre tropes, but I think he’s more embracing them and using them as a jump-off point to venture into his more meta territories. There’s a big bad and a group of plucky teen heroes and magic animals and evil monsters who appear from out of nowhere, but so much of it feels fresh because the rest of the book just feels like it’s own bizarre, trippy entity.
This is the second printing of the book. A couple years ago, Study Group put out a limited edition of the first two chapters of “It Will All Hurt,” and this maintains that newspaper print, Golden Age size, 48-page presentation. Great care was taken in the making of the print version, and it exchanges the endless canvas feel of the webcomic for the feel of something older. Now that Dalrymple has finished the whole story and we’ll be seeing the final two issues come out in the next coming months. But for the impatient amongst you, Study Group still has the last four chapters on their Web site.
“It Will All Hurt” is its own unique experience of a comic, and it can’t really be compared to anything save “The Wrenchies.”
Final Verdict: 9.8 – Bizarre, fascinating, entertaining, rewarding, and brilliant.
