Knock ’em Dead #1
Writer: Eliot Rahal, Artist: Mattia Monaco, Colorist: Matt Milla, Letterer: Taylor Esposito, Publisher: AfterShock
I’ve got a joke for you: How did the comedian die?
You can bring a room alive by telling a good joke. You can put that room to sleep by explaining it. Like stories, jokes have a structure. Jokes are about setting up assumptions, lulling listeners into a feeling of security and then subverting those assumptions, catching people off guard and making them question why they had those assumptions in the first place. The timing, the pacing of a joke is absolutely critical to its success. You need to understand how strong your payoff is to understand how much you can build toward it, how long you can leave your audience gasping in anticipation. Knock ’Em Dead #1 delivers an interesting enough setup, but as a stand-alone comic, its reach exceeds its grasp.
Writer Eliot Rahal and artist Mattia Monaco aren’t all too interested in writing a funny book. In fact, the jokes in this book are obscured, hidden behind squiggles and emoji. In some ways, it’s a tool that keeps the focus on the desperation and character drama of wannabe comedian Pryor Brice. In others, it’s a crutch to avoid Rahal — himself a former stand-up — having to come up with a tight five of his own. This isn’t billed as a humor series, but with a first issue where the conflict is between a man and his audience, the lack of dialogue feels like having the splashy fight scene in an action flick just off screen.
For his part, Monaco nails the gritty, working-class feel of Chicago. There’s a longing, a desperation in the art that mirrors the journey Rahal is putting Pryor through. Similarly, the character acting is strong throughout, even if the cast feels one-dimensional. The colors are smoky, setting the stage for depressing open mic nights.
The struggle is in the paper-thin plot. The issue follows Pryor through his first, disastrous set, to a tragic accident that looks to incite the rest of the series. Given the title and cover, it shouldn’t come as much of a shock that he dies, but somehow that isn’t stopping him. It’s disappointing that the hook of the series isn’t present in this issue. We as an audience understand the setup of a struggling comedian; it’s archetypal. We understand the nagging sister who is just trying to keep the family together “after Mom and Dad, ya know…” We have been promised a supernatural story about a skeleton doing standup. It’s a long setup, that disappointingly serves to only tell us what we already know from the cover.
Sometimes when you build up a joke for so long and the payoff is so telegraphed, it falls flat on its face. The extended setup eats away at any sensible chuckles that might have been found. There’s an opportunity for Knock ’Em Dead to turn things around once the plot kicks into gear. There’s good bones to the story, even if the team is doing a bit of self-sabotage before things are really in motion. The issue is simply tough to recommend on its own merits.
So I’ll ask you again, how did the comedian die?
He had a sense of tumor.
Zachary Jenkins co-hosts the podcast Battle of the Atom and is the former editor-in-chief of ComicsXF. Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside all this.
