By Riff Reb's, Translated by Joe Johnson. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2019.
By M.C. Farrington
Historian, Hampton Roads Naval Museum
and Elizabeth Bentley
Contributing Writer
There is an allure to the sea; a timeless draw to its depths. The promise of bounty and adventure as limitless as the eternal horizon propelled ancient Phoenicians and Polynesians into vast tractless expanses millennia Before the Common Era. This calling approached its zenith during the Age of Sail, when a bevy of small European powers became global empires following the exploration, expropriation and exploitation their mariners' mastery of the sea made possible. But there has always been a darkness behind the draw. For time immemorial until the present day the sea has been wild and untamed frontier; an uncertain, occasionally violent veil between the worlds of the free and the slave, the living and the dead.
French artist Riff Reb's has sifted through a plethora of literature in this vein, carefully choosing the choicest cuts that compose Men at Sea, emblematic of the steady march towards the sea he has been on during his third decade as an illustrator. Although at 116 pages it is a short book, it is nonetheless an ambitious sampler that punches above its weight, both introducing the unfamiliar to this particular genre and breathing new life into the selected works for those already well versed in them.
It would be interesting enough just to glance through this collection of stories just for their artistic merit. Riff Reb’s visual style blends angular masculinity with azure, jade and crimson-hued terror to create sailors who navigate unceasingly changing and terrible seas. However, the addition of excerpts and truncated passages, from writers well known and not, cements the legitimacy of the graphic novel itself. The stories lend context to the style, motion and color of each frame. Without the addition of literary excerpts from masters, this could be dismissed as just a highly sophisticated comic book, but by channeling these great stories, it becomes something different.
The binding theme weaving together the eight varied tales, interspersed by seven double-page excerpts, can only be described as anxiousness; an anxiousness laid bare in words and augmented by the uncomfortable imagery Reb’s has created. This anxiousness tirelessly churns up the characters and narrative devices; relationships, women, abandonment, enslavement, unknown and known creatures, ghosts and other paranormal sightings, loss of identity, and death. In fact, death seems to loom in the corners of every panel as it is given form by the text to the side. And the main character of these stories in aggregate? The sea itself. It is the obsession that is loved and despaired of in every story.
The characters are so inextricably linked to the sea that they all become part of it as they go from one existence to the other. None so much so as the first story, The Sea Horses, based on William Hope Hodgson’s story of the same name, with a style reminiscent of Jamie Hewlitt (Gorrilaz) but decidedly true to the deep well of material from which Reb's drew. Hodgson’s story of a young boy and grandfather living on the sea immediately sets the landscape as brutal and unforgiving. The characters immediately talk of violent death and the dangers of the nearby water. Hodgson’s own experiences of childhood death and the rigors of his own life at sea informs the tone of this somber yet fanciful tale.
Homer’s The Odyssey is the next work to be illustrated. This classic story relates the narrator’s regret of ignoring Circe’s warnings as he watches his men be sacrificed to the creatures of the deep waters. The haunting cries from his man are both a plea for rescue and accusation as they call out to Ulysses.
The next story, a jarring switch from the previous two stories, is The Galley Slaves. These panels are based on the novels of Pierre Mac Orlan. Pierre Mac Orlan, a nom de plume, famously used his real name, Pierre Dumarchey, to pen pornographic stories, specifically dealing with flagellation and sadomasochism. The Galley Slaves is not one of his more scandalous writings, yet it is more sexually charged and violent than the other stories in Men at Sea. The jarring difference in tone regarding the sailors in this story is that they are not beleaguered friends and foes of the ocean but convicts who find delight in a death. The gender and sexual tension of the sailors is translated into murder but the loss of autonomy to gaining a taste of it again is the real theme of this strange tale. In contrast, Mac Orlan’s The Far South, which appears later in the book, is an adventure story and keeps with the straightforward themes of fear of death and isolation. This story seems to follow in the original tone of the stories where the hero is the sailor.
The stories progress to Kernok the Pirate by Eugene Sue. As one of the many literary excerpts that get a single complex panel treatment by Reb’s, it is darkly comic and cruel. Kernok the Pirate was originally published in 1830, when the July Revolution took place that overthrew Charles X and the Bourbon. Sue, who had joined the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis, who pledged under the Bourbon King of France, Louis XVIII, fought to help the Spanish Royalists restore King Ferdinand VII of Spain to reinstate his absolute power which had been rescinded by the Liberal Triennium. The anti-Spanish sentiment alongside the frustration of ever changing political climes leads to Kernok and his dark sense of humor regarding the detestable actions of men on the sea.
Malgorn the Whaler is a break from of the anxiety of hopelessness and death that has been the tone of the panels so far. Emile Condroyer’s prose waxes poetic as the third person narrator describes the awe that mixes with the anxiety of battling creatures of the sea. Condroyer’s approach falls into a more normative style of tales of the sea, which is why Reb’s illustration seems considerably more muted and more conservative than his other visual narration.
Marcel Schwob’s The Three Customs Officers brings the reader back to the mystery and horror of life on the sea. Schwob’s love of French slang in the dialogue provides humor to this dark tale. The three officers find themselves enmeshed in the paranormal and dreams which would be typical of Schwob. The Symbolist Movement, which favors dreams, visions, and associated powers of imagination, heavily influenced his work and those of his contemporaries. The ghostly visions and untimely deaths in the tumult of the sea that trapped and transported the hapless officers who fell to their own foibles made for a wonderful ghost tale.
B. Traven’s The Death Ship, Joseph Conrad’s A Smile of Fortune, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Sinking Ship are all stories that share the common link of labor, ethics, and incompetence of authority. The Death Ship is a direct criticism of the lack of ethical considerations for the sailors who work to keep ships going without fanfare or respect. Conrad’s A Smile of Fortune is a short musing on a sea captain’s desire for another man’s wife while stopping at a port. The captain navigates the deaths and misfortunes of the land-bound but is now reconsidering his life at sea after seeing a mysterious, beautiful woman.
Stevenson’s The Sinking Ship is an absurdist tale of a captain who endlessly bloviates while real action has to be taken to save sailors’ lives. This is another example of dark humor in the face of death. The sailors, when faced with musings on nonsensical directives given from the philosopher captain, begin to follow their own nonsensical rules, mostly involving earthly pleasures they were so long denied. The result is comical a tragedy for them all.
Victor Hugo’s The Toilers of the Sea is a part of the Romanticism movement and during his exile his works explored the past and nature in contrast to the ongoing Industrial Revolution which, seemed to destroy the lyrical lives of men who lived by the sea. This excerpt is an ode to the fearful beauty of the sea and the deadly treasures beneath. Jack London’s approach to the harrowing tales of the sea relies more on experience than imagination as he draws from his time as a sailor in Japan. The story is fraught with anxiety and suspense as it tells of the experience of being on ship during a typhoon. The story stands on as the true testament on surviving the sea.
Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne are linked in their tales of sea suspense and fantasy. Edgar Allen Poe’s featured story is A Descent into the Maelstrom. This tale of a man’s story of terror and survival of the capricious weather and sea is a great example of Poe’s style and tone. Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pim of Nantucket was the inspiration for Reb’s next selection, Jules Verne’s An Antarctic Mystery. This fanciful story of a ship stranded in ice is fanciful and amusing in the style of Verne but it is does touch on the sailors anxiousness over the many dangers and unexpected occurrences in the sea. This story does seem to give the reader a break from the high level of stress in the other stories and present some whimsy which can be taken as wink from Reb’s himself.
No less an authority than retired Admiral James Stavridis, former NATO supreme commander and chairman of the board of the US Naval Institute, praised Men at Sea for making these classic seafaring stories, some of which he referred to when teaching his students, so accessible. We could not agree more. For those without the time to leisurely dine on a surfeit of great sea literature, Dead Reckoning, a new imprint of the Naval Institute Press, has delivered a sumptuous yet svelte sampler of the meatiest morsels for American readers drawn to this rarefied kind of darkness.
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