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News Briefs featuring Brian Ralph
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VICE praises Daybreak's "totally immersive" storytelling
Updated April 3, 2013
"Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #81"
Nick Gazin
VICE Magazine, 11 February 2013
This book has been on the shelves for a while but I liked it a lot and just put off reviewing it because I lost it in one of the many piles of books that have made my apartment impossible to traverse.
I always like Brian Ralph's drawings. There's something about the way he draws rubble and splintering wood that is very comforting. His lines and sense of volume and reductive drawing style are approachable, but he's always good with textures. I think I know what his drawings would feel like were I to exist within the world of his comics. I don't know if I ever read a longer work by Brian Ralph that I cared about too much but I cared about this one.
The big cool concept of this book is that you are seeing the world from the protaganist's point of view for the duration of the entire book and there are no "cuts." In a lot of ways it feels like a video game in a good way. The storytelling device is a big success and totally immersive.
The story begins with you waking up by a pile of rubble. You are then greeted by a friendly one armed man who helps you and takes you on a little adventure. The storytelling technique works well and this is a great comic. I feel bad that I didn't review it earlier.
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Brian Ralph's "Daybreak" is "the best first-person zombie comic of the year!"
Updated June 13, 2012
Daybreak by Brian Ralph
Feb 29, 2012
Moore Memorial Public Library
You are one of the remaining few. Surrounded on all sides by the undead you rely solely on your new one-armed friend to guide you through the apocalyptic wasteland in the best first-person zombie comic of the year!
This book takes a rather sizable risk from the very first panel: it breaks the fourth wall. Meaning a character looks directly into the panel and addresses the audience. This is a first-person comic, so the main character (you) never speaks and we never see you. This may strike some readers as gimmicky and I’m sure some people will prefer a hero we can see, but I loved the novel attempt to immerse the reader. The art is cartoony and unique. Ralph uses super thick and scratchy outlines and empty white space with just a few scratch marks for detail. It makes for a look that is both cluttered and spare and fits very well for an apocalyptic look. The characters for the most part are a bit stock to the zombie genre, but Ralph has a real sense of pacing and dialogue that had me care about the story anyways. The one exception is your nameless one-armed guide. He is a funny, unusual, and ultimately tragic figure that I found myself rooting for and missing whenever he wasn’t on screen. He is in many ways the hero of the story and the first person narrative is just a way to view things differently. This isn’t going to be for all comic or zombie fans and it is a little on the short side, but if you want something truly different, take a risk with Daybreak.
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