Climbing Out
by Brian Ralph

Good fairy tales stick around.

Hans Christian Andersen, Dr. Seuss and the Brothers Grimm are all household names because they told deep, engaging stories that fully consumed their readers.

A rare type of skill is required to pare a story back to a few bonsai-like stems without killing the heart of the art, and it's not particularly fashionable at the moment. It flies in opposition to postmodern writers like Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, who overwhelm readers with dense thickets of plot, layer cakes of metaphor, and tangled bundles of digressions.

Some of the best graphic artists — Chris Ware, for example — are also less-than spartan. Ware deploys huge pages sprawling with double meaning and heartbreakingly perfect detail. You don't read "Jimmy Corrigan" — you decode it. Likewise, Tony Millionaire has made a name for himself with the devilishly crafty and gorgeously elaborate nautical scenes that populate "Maakies," his weekly comic strip/artistic outlet.

Brian Ralph, however, is of the old school.

Like a classic fairy tale, his latest graphic novel wields a disarmingly simple style that conceals a rich motherlode of meaning.

You don't read "Climbing Out" as much as you plunge through it. The clarity of action and dialogue is complete: As its sweetly simian protagonist digs, squirms, paddles and runs through an underworld labyrinth of rock and water, you find yourself swept along for the journey.

Though many of Ralph's drawings are cunningly crafted, the devil is never in the details; readers don't have to hunt for hidden messages in any particular panel. A subterranean river may be drawn with a thousand nobbly little crags of rock, but the details blend seamlessly into an elegant landscape. Motion and composition come first; though Ralph's style is incredibly engaging and smooth, it always takes a back seat to the substance of the story's action.

Rather than going for visual jokes or "Wow, I can't believe he could render that giant green dragon so perfectly," Ralph carefully controls the white space and textures that define the flow and momentum of his drawings. At times, all background detail will drop out, emphasizing a single action or emotion. At one point — perhaps the strongest part of the book — an act of magic is depicted by a series of blank pages. Already on the edge of your seat, you can't flip through them fast enough to find out what's going to happen next.

It's great. It feels like the climactic scene of an action movie.

And while "Climbing Out" lacks the intellectual pretense of many of its graphic novel colleagues, it demands multiple readings; it's ripe with ideas about human evolution, individual versus collective decision making and the double-edged sword of imagination.

Hypnotic and tremendously fun, "Climbing Out" is another bright spot on Ralph's already shining CV. Curious readers looking for tomorrow's fairy tales would do well to start right here.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)