Rodney R Rodney: The Omnibus
Writer/Artist: Violaine Briat
Print designer: Patrick Crotty
Publisher: Self-published / $35
Winter 2025
The local cryptid? He lives down the block. His name is Rodney, and he knows how to pick locks. And walk around upside-down on his hands, like that scene in The Exorcist. It seems like Violaine Briat always has Rodney brandishing a knife, or a pair of hedge clippers, a sickle. In one Rodney R Rodney strip, he sold a lock of his own hair for ten dollars so that he could buy some pruning shears. The porch cam caught him standing outside the front door at 3AM again.
And then there’s all the murders. Some Slenderman-looking smiley face fellow is wanted by the police. Looks kind of like someone we know. Between the getting killed and the neighbors so haunting and creepily ubiquitous you kind of wish you’d get killed so you could stop seeing him everywhere, it’s uh not a great place to live, this suburb. But it’s cheap.
That’s modern horror. Monsters are bad but have you met the neighbors? The kid at the convenience store, JFC. Life is a nightmare without mass murderers, and now the lack of staff at work means you’ve got to pull another double. And modern like the opposite of “if they had cell phones, the story would be over.” The freaked out fiancé, old man roughneck, and imaginative and overanxious teenager are all on the same subreddit, trying to figure out what kind of creature Rodney truly is.
Briat has great style. The perfect level of cartoony for a comic strip. The characters are loose and expressive, and yet Rodney still stands out. He’s just not built like us. People’s limbs don’t look like that. Nobody should be purple and smiling that way. Briat also rules at exploiting the shadowy boundary of visible-but-obscured, clearly lurking but also kind of hard to see. Just enough detail in the art for there to be a background that Rodney can haunt. Constantly.
There’s finesse in the printing process that helps a simple strip so strangely capture the feeling of two separate worlds, strip and book. Briat has collaborated with Patrick Crotty of Peow2 for the print edition of the omnibus. A duochrome affair in purple and indigo, and in the same widescreen book format (with slipcase) as A Frog in the Fall. Briat makes good use of the color as a storyteller, but also it’s just a nice looking book.
It’s a strip, so the dimensions feel familiar even if the format doesn’t, like a strip collection. Something you’d find in the humor section of the bookstore rather than on the graphic novel shelf. But gourmet? The printing/presentation makes the book feel bespoke, like it belongs on the graphic novel shelf, not next to Garfield Weighs In at the Scholastic Book Fair.
That said, this book is funny as hell. Rodney is a genuinely upsetting dude, and his comic is full of situations where I would be leaving town so fast the sonic boom doesn’t break the lease so much as shatter it. Briat harnesses tremendous slasher movie he’s-right-behind-you energy, then transfers that tension into immensely awkward humor. He hasn’t killed you (yet), so now you’ve got to talk to Rodney. Drive him to Home Depot. Look at the pictures he shows you on his phone.
I love reading episodic strips in these big single draughts. Omnibus readers get to enjoy both the strip style taking the pressure off of furthering the plot to focus on how the moment feels, with a book payoff coming from how telling the story that way consistently gives the characters room to develop. An epic, palpable, slow burn that comes from you spending time with the people in the book and watching them change.
So Rodney R Rodney is sitcom stuff, slice of life, foibles. Depicting normal- relatable- little interactions gets the reader’s guard down. The menace sets in. The strip will wallow in mounting tension, only to pop the bubble once paths cross with someone who’s scared but still a goof. It’s Briat who is messing with you, not Rodney. The guy owns a lot of sharp objects, and is super opinionated yet devoid of tact, allergic to respecting comfort zones, but he still hasn’t killed anybody in the group chat.
“Oh, you mean Rodney?” Time and again, what appears critically dire- several strips’ worth of paranoia- completely falls apart once someone in town who isn’t bothered by Rodney’s unique approach to… everything shows up. Well. His coffee order is exactly as off-putting as you’d think. His grip on personal space is as bad as his actual grip, which is inexplicably clammy. So maybe they’re bothered by it. But they aren’t scared of him. You never really get used to the guy, but.
Then the plot shows up again, so it can twist. Some of it is creative misdirection. Most of it is assumption. The chapters play out as a series of suburban mainstays, from mowing the lawn to trick-or-treating to sleeping on the couch, but the episodes turn over without any resolution for the series’ bottomless tension.
The reader, depository of this dread, makes meaning from the same clues as the characters as well, telling the story of the town’s mystery murders to themselves as they see it- and leaving Briat free to do the unexpected. Reveal the reader’s misconceptions.
The story is there, always was. The monster was always waiting, the reason for all the tension and horror was present all along, emerging from obscurity like stepping from the shadows. The little glimpses of history doled out over the series are a breadcrumb trail, leading to a dark and bloody place. And it’s dark heart? Oh, you mean Rodney?
Rodney R Rodney is still available to read online from Webtoon; original print installments are on Violaine Briat’s webshop, and RRR: The Omnibus wherever niche comics and books are sold.
