Black and White and Black: On the Comics of Chris Reynolds

Around the start of the first millennium, a territory on the northern coast of Africa fell under control of the Romans, who dubbed it “Mauretania,” possibly derived from a native word or from the Greek for “dark” (or “obscure”)—the root that eventually informed the term Moor. Centuries later, the Cunard Line affixed the name to a giant ship, built in Newcastle and launched in 1906, which for several years enjoyed distinction as both the world’s fastest and largest ocean liner, beloved by many, though called by Kipling “the monstrous nine-decked city.” It was scrapped between 1935 and 1937, and parts of the interior found a home in a pub in Bristol.

Eight decades after the RMS ’s maiden voyage, Chris Reynolds, a Welsh-born artist in his mid twenties, embarked on what would be his life’s work, a beguiling series of loosely connected stories that he called . The work had nothing to do with that remote place or with seafaring vessels of might run across Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Monitor, ’s signature character, always dons a helmet with a striplike visor masking his eyes. (Today he wouldn’t look so out of place: it resembles nothing so much as a virtual-reality headpiece.) The architecture alone is worth the trip: lipstick-shaped temples of music, a house like a geodesic dome crossed with a web made by a spider on acid.