“Jon Rohner”: Short Stories in the South Asian Seas

We head back to the South Seas, always grist for the mill for cartoonists doing adventure stories. “Terry and the Pirates” comes to mind first, but in the world of European comics, I can also think of Corto Maltese’s adventures, and Theodore Poussin’s series.

Add to that now, “Jon Rohner.”

(Don’t get me started on pirate stories, in general. That’s a list that needs a scroll…)

This book is the story of an adventurous man of the sea who befriends the newly-relocated writer, Robert Louis Stevenson. He shares his experiences with the writer, and we get to see those adventures drawn out for us.

It is an attractive book with some solid short stories, though there are a couple problems with the writing we need to discuss.

Hoist the Credit Sails

What’s Going On?

The book begins with three pages of text and reference photos from Alfonso Font. Don’t be turned away by this. It’s interesting information and helps set up the story of the book.

Robert Louis Stevenson died at a relatively early age. When doctors told him he didn’t have long to live, he left the “civilized” world behind and chased his dream of visiting — and ultimately moved to — an island in the South Pacific.

“Jon Rohner” is the name of Font’s fictional sailor who befriends Stevenson there. The two share many delightful conversations. Rohner has tales to tell from the area and his life at sea. Font grounds all of these stories in real life, whether it’s with the local flora and fauna, or with various political situations between governments and the locals. It’s a solid mix of real and fictional.

And, sometimes, it’s just a love story gone tragically wrong.

There’s a nice friendship between Stevenson and Rohner that feels natural. One is an adventurer with lots of good stories to tell, while the other is a writer who is always in search of good stories to write. It’s a natural fit, but it’s not the focus of the book.

The focus is the series of seven unconnected short stories that Rohner tells, only one of which directly involves Stevenson. It’s a great set-up for a series, and Font uses it well.

Most of the stories hinge on interactions to some degree between the local native people and the encroaching Europeans and Americans who tend to want to take everything over in the area. There’s the business man who claims rights to everything in the sea, for example. There’s also the ship captain who enjoys nothing more than shooting at natives from the safety of his boat.

This is not a political polemic, though. It deals in the reality of the time, and it doesn’t shy away from showing how ugly it could get on either side, but Font is busy telling stories and showing troubled or conflicted characters. He’s not urging you to a sign a petition on the last page.

Font draws some nice parallels in a couple of the stories, notably in the one involving that ship’s captain I mentioned before. Who are the real “monsters” in these situations? Where does a lack of understanding lead to bad decisions?

There’s also the story of a friend of Rohner who falls in love with a local and it drives him crazy. In another, Rohner is a hired hand on a ship carrying a questionable cargo that carries the story with its tension. And in what is probably the best drawn story in the series, a disaster at sea only gets worse when Rohner’s ship is found by another that is perhaps more dangerous than the storms.

All of this, of course, gives Font lots of opportunities to draw beautiful landscapes, lush jungles, and dramatic seascapes. He doesn’t disappoint. Everything feels right for the time period of the book, and Font doesn’t take any shortcuts to avoid drawing ships or detailed backgrounds.

It’s mostly three tiers of panels per page, though Font often bumps it up to four. Every page feels packed full of art, and the coloring is a strong help in the storytelling. It has that lush painted feel that was the standard for high end books of the time here in America, but it still looks like a comic book. The solid colors are still solid, but they have the texture of the paint to go along with them. It doesn’t overpower the line work; it works with it. There are no color-held lines or Photoshop gradients. Everything on the page remains organic.

Well, except for the lettering. We’ll get to that soon, but first:

The Problems: Exposition and Lettering

The biggest problem is with the set-up of the book. It’s a series of short stories told from one friend to another. It’s all heavily narrated. The story is told, not shown. The art is pretty and keeps the eye pleased, but there’s always that lingering feeling that someone is telling you the story. It’s passive.

On top of that, it’s still overwritten. The narration isn’t adding much to the story, besides telling it. It’s not an unreliable narrator. It’s just an excuse to have someone tell the story, which is always a flashback.

Perhaps worst of all, there’s some very clunky expositional dialogue. On one page, the translation gives the single worst piece of dialogue you could ever include in your exposition — twice.

“As you know…”

If they know, then why are you telling them? Oh, right, because this is the worst kind of bare naked exposition. There’s no attempt to be artful or subtle about it.

And then, of course, there’s a lettering issue. This is a book packaged through SAF Comics, so of course it’s all lettered in Whizbang.

There’s a lot of talking heads in this book, so the lettering gets creative in pushing the balloons around the panels, sometimes hiding corners behind foreground objects or overlapping balloons.

I saw a couple of issues with that through the course of the book. For starters, the overlapping balloons wouldn’t match the overlapping characters. Take, for instance, this panel:

The man in front who talks first has his balloon behind the guy who is behind him and talking second. I’m likely the only person reading this book to ever say this, but I will say it: That confused me at first. I stumbled over this panel in the same way I’d trip over a drawing where a character is drawn both in front of and behind another character at the same time.

I think the issue is magnified by the fact that the characters are so close together and so close to the balloons. If they were further separated, it wouldn’t be as noticeable.

Then there’s this panel:

That balloon is all sorts of contorted, if you stop to think about it for a half second.

It’s overlapping the panel border on the right side, popping out in front of the tree branch just underneath it. At the same time, it’s behind that very same tree branch as it recedes into the background. It’s like the balloon is twisted 45 degrees, but the text isn’t.

As a bonus, some parts of the tree leaf above the balloon are drawn with a slight overlap over the balloon, while some are clearly behind it.

Again, this is nothing 99% of people reading this book will notice or be bothered by. I think it matters, though, and I think it’s instructive to point the things out when they happen, or nobody will ever learn.

On the other hand, ignorance can be bliss…

Recommended?

I love a good short story collection. That’s what this is. It is not without its flaws, but those are easy enough to overlook. It’s exotic tales from a foreign land with an easily-explained set of rules and political dynamics. Tying it all together to Robert Louis Stevenson is a neat literary trick that makes it unique.

And, yes, Alfonso Font’s art is still great, even if it isn’t as flashy as some of his work on the “Taxi” series.