Every year, there’s a book that drops right as the year is ending, and everyone has slid their favorite books into place forgetting to leave space for another, and that book is always one of the best of the year. Thank you Ram V, Campbell, Watters, Kumar, Loughridge, and Bidikar, for fulfilling that winter tradition with The One Hand & The Six Fingers.
Many already called this “one of the best comics of the year” back when it was published in single issues, or rather, two (that were actually one) of the best series of the year, since they were published as two distinct books, The One Hand and also The Six Fingers. Now, in its collected form, it takes a slightly different shape, and it’s all the better for it. As it was coming out, it was clear that it was meant to be read this way, but its presentation and order here highlight the careful dance both series nailed as they worked through the duel narrative. It’s particularly impressive because they’re difficult to talk about as separate works even while they are able to tell their own stories with distinct themes, all the while propping each other up.
The main synthesis that The One Hand & The Six Fingers achieves is discussing themes of The Matrix and Blade Runner at the same time. One way to pitch it would be “what if Deckard from Blade Runner was hunting Neo from The Matrix” which is at least 90% right by my math. Of course, these guys are big comic nerds, so I expect the things that actually served as inspiration were some 2000AD comics called ‘Internet Messiah’ and ‘Robot Hunter’ or some other equivalent.
Ari serves as our badass cop who barely follows the rules and backs out of his retirement for one last case, a third occurrence of a particular kind of serial killing happening in his city. Ari is quite the guy. He’s like a Frank Miller protagonist who was even more focused on the mission. His story really lets the themes of personhood shine, and is also a nice place where the creators get to put their (even more?) dystopian view on The Matrix on display. His half of the series ends with a horrible reveal effectively positing that people can’t ever really be happy. It presents monotonous but fulfilling days as the peak of human achievement, and that more would only be disastrous. In effect, it says, “most of us would choose to live in the Matrix, and so would you.”
Ari’s story generally swirls around that theme too, with his obsession to solve mysteries being a fun thread to follow all along. Why is he so concerned with his regular robot prostitute? Is it that stereotypical noir hero identity, or is it just his obsession with following the trail? Or is his noir hero archetype simply a part of him that he’s unconscious of, and those behaviors are what makes him happiest? The book doesn’t answer those questions, just leaves them peppered throughout the series.
The One Hand half of the series is also notably the half that seems more focussed on form and structure, too, which makes sense, given its themes. Campbell’s storytelling is great for this, and the structure feels like a constant haunting through the book. The more the panel composition looks like the cypher, the more the book–and Ari–feels like it’s flying off the rails. In general, Campbell is also just a master of using shadows and inks to tell the story, and the details he chooses to put on display are just so fun to pour over.
Johannes’ half of the book is where the team really got to be weird, though. Sumit Kumar feels like a wind freed across the book. He still works in panels most of the time, but any grid you could point to would be a stretch of the definition, and more than that, it’s just not as structured. It feels like he had more space to ideate and his pages have a different energy because of that, which speaks to the themes of The Six Fingers.
As much as Johannes is our Neo to Ari’s Deckard, Johannes also feels like the most unique character of the whole thing. He’s a terrorist-serial killer-academic-laborer-revolutionary-robot-philosopher. Sure, you could probably come up with a similar guy (I could probably argue C-3PO as basically that), but even with that guy, it’s surprising where we end up. In one half of the book, we have people who desperately want to be kept busy at the perfect level of strenuous without actually pushing too hard. In this half, we have a meditation on what it really means to be trapped in a system. To feel like there’s no way out, to be conscious of it without really being conscious of it. The choice of making Johannes a grad student with a menial labor job is not lost on me.
When he chooses to blow shit up in this mindless pursuit of freedom, it just makes sense. His pursuit is one of intuition, and it flies in the face of his ordered system. What makes things even better is his relationship with the artist of the book, who becomes obsessed with him because of his being a serial murderer. Her art is pretentious and kinda stupid, but I do appreciate that she, as a person, can do art, whereas Johannes, a robot, can only write research papers and kill.
In a lot of ways, the conclusion of this half might even be more bleak than “all we want to do is dream dreams that are mostly content” in Ari’s half. The finale is all about the robots waking up with their language they made for themselves across the years. With this newfound ability to communicate and act, what do they do? To break free of the chains that are existence, they dive off skyscrapers.
The One Hand & The Six Fingers is a book about our existence and how we wrestle with the systems in place. Do we accept ourselves within it, chasing our meager desires? Do we see the system for what it is and kill ourselves escaping it?
