RYAN READS: RESONANT

[SPOILER-FREE]

I told myself I was going to write some content for my website and so a few months later, here we are.

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I actually picked up Resonant not for the story, but because the colours interested me. Resonant’s covers (especially the one for the trade paperback, which I own) have these intensity to them that is really elevated by the bright colours and while the sequential pages aren’t in neons – probably for the best, for the sake of my eyes – they’re just as nice to look at. It’s a very beautiful book.

This was around the time I’d been taking some colouring classes with Chris Sotomayor on Comics Experience and I was trying to put into words how much I liked the colours in certain comics without constantly harping on about Jordie Bellaire’s work on Moon Knight. So it was definitely a happy accident that Resonant caught my eye, and it was an even happier accident when I actually started reading it.

Resonant follows the story of Paxton and his three children, trying to survive in your everyday post-apocalyptic nightmare. One of Paxton’s kids, Stef, is chronically ill and Paxton has to venture outside of their safehouse and into the ravaged remains of the old world in order to get medicine. As you can imagine, this isn’t an easy task.

This particular apocalypse is interesting. I’m always a sucker for the darker shit, but Resonant focuses on the world ending via ‘waves’ that cause whoever is nearby to succumb to whatever dark urges are within their head at that particular moment. I imagine people with intrusive thoughts get this one more than me, because my head is often void of any thought at all. It makes you wonder, though – does everyone have some innate darkness within them? I’ve always been the kind of person who thinks as people in a grey area, as in we’re neither good or bad. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. (I know I am. Maybe it’s the waves.)

The most important thing I found about Resonant though, wasn’t the colours or the plot, or the art. It was one particular character – Bec.

Bec is the oldest of Paxton’s kids and the protector of the other two. She’s capable, resourceful and a very get-shit-done kind of girl, which I respect, and she’s also a little bit of an asshole in the way that kids are.

Bec’s also on crutches, due to her left leg being missing below the knee. This is probably just an ‘oh, cool’ moment for your average person and maybe ten years ago it would have been an ‘oh, cool’ moment for me, too. A lot of people talk about representation and diversity without really understanding what it feels like to be on the outside of things. The thing is, as a person who is also disabled and uses crutches, I’ve become intimately familiar with both people in fiction and in real life percieving me as a burden, to the point where I even consider myself a burden sometimes.

Bec isn’t a burden. She’s saving lives. She’s kicking ass and especially in a setting where one wrong move means that you and everyone around you dies, it means something. I went into this comic with a hint of skepticity and came out full of feelings I wasn’t quite ready for from a cheesy post-apocalyptic comic, because there are two disabled characters in this story and neither of them are talked down to or felt like a drag on resources.

Bec’s the furthest thing from a problem – she’s a badass, and I’d follow her to the ends of the earth.

Even writing this, I don’t really know what David Andry’s thoughts were – I don’t know if he wrote her that way intentionally, or if it was an ‘oh, cool’ moment for him as well. I’m not sure that it really matters, because the end result is the same.