RANXEROX
OPENING NIGHT, 1988. THE BROADWAY theater is packed with the international elite. They’re in ecstasy. The show’s a real hit, gorgeous show girls and a new dancer-singer who’s running through all of Fred Astaire’s routines even more perfectly than the old master-hoofer in his best days. And why not? The star’s been programmed with every Fred Astaire move and inflection: he’s a Roman robot named Ranxerox. To his 12-year-old girlfriend, Lubna, sitting in the loge with the show’s leather-masked producer, Mr. Volare, he’s known as Ranx. And now, just as he is in the middle of a song and the audience starts to rise to their feet in jubilation, Ranx screams out, “Leave Lubna alone, pig.” Swinging the huge heavy arm of a stage-prop phonograph out into the crowd, crushing a few under its weight, he leaps to the box and breaks the producer’s neck with his cane. He rushes out of the theater with the resisting Lubna in tow. The audience applauds him on his way. It’s New York this time, but it’s the same story in Rome, where they usually live: Ranx is the most jealous robot in the world, and when he spied Lubna, the little brat junkie love of his computer heart, reaching out to give Mr. Volare a kiss, he couldn’t stand it. How was he to know, hoofing away on that stage, that Lubna was only flirting with the old producer to get more coke out of him. She adores coke but she loves heroin more and she’s always getting Ranx in trouble, sending him off to help her get the stuff. Like any kid her age, Lubna’s demanding, and she’s lucky to have Ranx so set on her. Even her girlfriends in Rome think so; Martina, say, who’s had a little fling with Ranx and would gladly live with him if he’d leave Lubna.
Ranx is no collection of mechanical gears and pulleys, nor is he a sleek metaloid, droning computerspeak. His body, except for the hardware where his brains should be and the enormous batteries in the back, is just like any other normal, healthy male built like a body builder. Depending on your taste, his face may turn you off; it’s a bit simian, his bluish green upper lip occasionally curls up above the gumline and his nose looks like an Italian two-prong electric plug. Otherwise, he’s almost humanlike. He feels hate and love and joy. But his feelings are the photocopies of human passions, the Xerox of human emotions. And sometimes when there is a a disturbance in his circuitry—for instance, when he has been tampered with—Ranx’s emotions, especially his ferocity and hatred, are magnified beyond any known human scale. His love for Lubna is of this order. No one can explain why, except that perhaps something went amiss in his circuits and now Lubna is for him an endless, looped tape of love. He’s as obsessed with her as Humbert was with Lolita, King Kong with Fay Wray.
In a way, Ranxerox is the story of the greatest robot love of the ’80s, or let’s say Ranx and Lubna are the couple of the ’80s, the marriage of the spoiled human and the servant computer. For me. the bande dessinée (the terms “comic strip” or “comic book” are inadequate) Ranxerox, by the young Italian artists Stefano Tamburini and Tanino Liberatore, is the emblem of our decade as surely as the Yellow Book was for the 1890s. And, as with that ’90s publication, Ranxerox provokes strong reactions. At first it repelled me. I thought it too violent, its eroticism callow and perverse. I dismissed it by labeling it Punk, a work created by and designed for deranged Punkers . . . and this mollified me, as if in having found a label I would no longer have to think why Ranxerox had disturbed me so greatly. I had to read (see) it several times before I realized how fresh, complex, hilarious, serious, and beautiful it is. Ranxerox is a line of oxygen for these stale days of remakes and art clones, in these foul times of humanistic homilies and the confessions of the middle-class soul that make up most of our contemporary literature.
This is a work of immense energy about entropy, the crumbling and rotting and decaying of Western culture as projected into the period of 1988 and 1989. In this regard, Tamburini and Liberatore are the visionary, romantic Zolas of the bande dessinée, examining a slice of the sick social tissue and locating its stage of disintegration at a future date. Or to put it another way: if a Roman wall or New York City pothole is crumbling at a certain rate today and is left unrepaired, what will it look like five years hence? And what will those cities and their inhabitants look like?
Ranx and Lubna live in a Rome leveled into social tiers; theirs is nearly the lowest, the 30th level. It’s so vile there, so derelict and dangerous, that the subway refuses to stop within its precincts. The children on the 30th level, unlike the generation of the ’60s, live alone in crummy flats; they do not band together in urban communes to promote new instances of love as a current against the ugliness of the immoral adult world. There is little shading between the child and the adult world down there, where not to be part of a pack of knife-wielders and acid-throwers is to invite disaster. (Unless you have a Ranx to protect you and maul your enemies.) There are all kinds of dangers. Everyone is doing heavy drugs, both grown-ups and children. (Ranx’s system being what it is, he only goes in for Vinavil, a glue he shoots up whenever he gets the chance.) Lubna and her friends are not squirreling mushroom buttons into their granola in search of altered states or spiritual transcendence. Lubna needs the white kind of sorrow, and to get it she and Ranx go to the studio of the artist Raniero, painter of copied and invented electronic circuits. Courtesy of the artist, Lubna shoots up while he Polaroids the event. But his generosity is a ruse to have Lubna deactivate Ranx so that he can kidnap her for later use as an artwork entitled Corpse of a Young Dope Addict. Ranx is then reactivated and ordered, on pain of Lubna’s life, to go to a popular club and, by means of supersonic plug-in, blast all the merrymakers—especially one Giorgio Fox—to an ear-bursting death. At 17, Giorgio is the most powerful and feared art critic of Rome, so much so that he must travel about accompanied by two twin-pistol-packing bodyguards. It’s no wonder the kid needs protection, for the man who tries to engineer his elimination from the pages of art-scene power is the young critic’s father, Raniero, who’s fearful that his son will give him a bad review for his forthcoming show. On the 30th level, reputation is the bottom line of Oedipal murder.
In this ruthless crowd Ranx, for all his violence, seems lovable indeed. For, as Ranx says to Martina, he can’t be judged as if he were human; he’s only synthetic. In this sense, Tamburini and Liberatore have created a robot Candide, an innocent whose adventures with the world point more to a vision of humanity than to the education of the protagonist. This is not to say, though, that since his creation Ranx has not undergone changes.
In his earliest avatar, in a black and white strip created by Tamburini in 1978, when the artist was 23, Ranx was both in the drawing and in his characterization a much cruder fellow. That’s when he was called Rank Xerox1 and he roamed about alone, violent and desperate, in a totally nighttime world. Here Rank steps out of his class and enters a chic bar on the 17th level and asks for a drink. He plays the Ramones’ “Now I Want to Sniff Some Glue.” A couple stand at the bar. She’s in a transparent sheath dress, one breast bared; he’s in a ratty fur-lined overcoat: he’s an “underground artist.” She prods the artist into criticizing Rank’s choice of music. Rank reciprocates by chopping off his tormentor’s fingers. It’s a tight, mad story in 13 frames, a mixture of Grand Guignol and film noir. The disinterested barman’s only concerns are that Rank return the man’s fingers and that the artist stop calling him “Giorgio,” since his real name is “Baby Blù.” As he exits, Rank tosses the fingers over his shoulder, but he keeps the rings that were once on them for Lubna. Many adventures as violent as this—and more so—follow, all characterized by the same grim, black humor of the underclass in hell. In this earlier strip Rank’s world is hermetic and lonely—Lubna is in his life but at its margins—and no broader context for the 30th level is ever established. It’s simply an enclave of misery, and you are left to wonder about what better lives there may be at the higher levels, if, as in Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1907), there is a class living in calm and oligarchic splendor, a place to crawl up to from the lower depths if you have the ambition, will, and luck. And because there is no contrasting and larger world to contextualize that of the 30th level, no characters outside of their sphere for them to be measured against, such as Mr. Volare the Producer, Rank and Lubna emerge as freaks of a special universe.
But computers keep changing. There’s always a newer and better model. Rank Xerox, the black and white character, was replaced by Ranxerox, a color model. And along with this came other changes as well. Color changes the conception: in this case we move from caricature to Romance. The premise of the Romance is not that everything will turn out all right, but that everything, even the most sordid thing, has its own glamor. Even life at the 30th level now has its colorful glamor, a color Xerox of its own misery. Frames of the narrative pronounce themselves beautiful, icons worthy of individual attention. This would have killed any other strip, but not Ranxerox. Tamburini’s original black and white creation had the rawness to match the as yet unformed conception of the character of Ranxerox and the limited, dark part of the globe he crawled through, the anarchic 30th level. Even at this early stage Rank Xerox was a singular conception, and had it remained at that plateau it would have won its place in the pantheon of the personal, maverick bande dessinée art in the tradition of American ’60s underground comix: Rank Xerox would have been the counterpoint to R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural.
With the collaboration of Liberatore, Ranxerox flowered into a work of great visual richness matched by a greater subtlety and amplification of the narrative scope, encompassing a whole social context. Ranx and Lubna now live in both night- and daytime worlds, the 30th as well as other levels, and with all new possibilities attending that. Moreover, Liberatore humanized and eroticized the characters—even Ranx—and brought them closer to our conventions of reality. He invested the physical world with the heft and volume of marble, but a marble pockmarked and burled, picked at as if flecked by a soft rain of corrosive acid: everything everywhere is stigmatized by this pocked crumbling: buildings and streets and bridgeworks and the chrome of old cars, and everything is crumbling away inchmeal. It’s the cities, Rome and New York, that are falling away; it’s the world falling away, of course. And strangely, the most perverse aspect of Ranxerox is that all this decay is made so beautiful as to eliminate any immediate moralistic subtext. Oscar Wilde could not have done this better.
After breaking Mr. Volare’s neck Ranx leaves the theater and the applauding audience. He’s crossing 42nd Street with Lubna under his arm. A knot of junkies look on as Ranx spanks Lubna’s bare behind. (No, one junkie isn’t looking, he’s busy spiking his arm.) She’s furious. He’s bullied her and he’s ruined everything by ruining the show. Now there’s no money for dope and they’re in this strange city, New York . . . what will become of them?
Frederic Tuten is the Books Editor of Artforum. He is a novelist and professor on the faculty of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at the City College of New York.
The further adventures of Ranxerox, published this fall in Italy by Frigidaire magazine and in France by Albin Michel, will be followed in the next issue of Artforum.
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NOTES
1. Stefano Tamburini’s strip was originally called Rank Xerox, but the company of that name threatened to sue him so he changed the names of the character and the strip to Ranxerox. The letter from the company. incidentally, charges the strip with being violent. obscene, and indecent.
Rank Xerox, originally in black and white. appeared in the magazine Cannibale, of which Tambunni was founding editor. Although he acknowledged the assistance of another Italian artist, Tanino Liberatore, for some of the black and white pages. it was not until 1980 that the two went into full collaboration to create the color version we have now.
Albums of the first color version have been published in Italy, Spain, and France. As of July 1983, the American magazine Heavy Metal is serializing Part One of Ranxerox.
I have not seen the Spanish translation, but I’m told it is the best. The French moderate much in diction and eliminate some of the sexual imagery. The American version does a journeyman’s job when it is not simply inaccurate. For no reason that I understand, they age Lubna at 18, when in fact she is a late 12. I checked this with Stefano Tamburini when I went to interview him in Rome this summer and he confirmed my reading.
The language of Ranxerox in Italian is muscular and street-raw, the poetry of the gutter. It’s worth learning Italian for Dante, Eugenio Montale, Cesare Pavese, and Tamburini/Liberatore.
