Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat: Absurdist Baroque Punk Comic Melancholia

In the dim history of my mumblings there are mentions of a property called, intriguingly, Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat. I first read this and wrote about it back at Table of Malcontents, mentioning it in a post on comic book MBQ. The post earned me to scorn of an entire generation of American manga fans (”white, fat, mousy-haired, wire-framed and lacking in personal hygiene”), and perhaps was not the best venue in which to introduce Rankle.

Allow me, instead, to quote from creator Rosearik Rikki Simons:

Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat is about a child Ghoul named Ranklechick. Ranklechick lives near Jupiter’s moon, Europa, within a sentient space station called the Europan Zoo. He lives with his three-legged cat, Pumpernick. Since birth, Ranklechick has been accused by his father of murdering his mother and now the sad little Ghoul thinks he can make everything right if he can just talk to his mother’s ghost. This is Ranklechick’s obsession, and every Ghoul on board the Zoo must have an obsession in order for the Zoo to survive. Being that he is of the inventor class of Ghoul, Ranklechick invents an absurd collection of devices in his quest to speak to his mother, like his Bliss Extractor, which he uses to try to get an autograph from the ghost of Charles Dickens, or his Sphere of Belligerence, a spacecraft propulsion system that literally insults physics. All Ghouls are social idiots trapped in a society that thrives off of absurdity, like a vast population of Asperger’s patients. Ranklechick spends his time living in the densely populated Europan Zoo, building necrotic communicators when he isn’t being interrupted by the the strange and unnatural — and he has many interruptions: running from handshaking lessons, avoiding being made into candy by the evil android Nathan Burblepinch, getting repeatedly decapitated, suffering the company of oniomaniac children, being possessed by the Spirit of Failure, suicidal disembodied brains, melancholic ham, a sardonic talking three-legged cat for a best friend, and all the while Ranklechick continues to believe he is becoming a comic book character. When all is quiet and he has time to think, he wonders if he’ll ever get to tell his dead mother that he loves her. This is a comedy.

I was so taken with Ranklechick’s cast and setting that I penned two pieces of fanart, something I never, ever do, one of which can be seen to the right. That is Sister Toovibohnes (I’m iffy on the spelling), a straight-laced space nun that lives aboard the Europan Zoo with the rest of the gang.

Ranklechick has been generously made available for free on Simons’ website, along with Super Information Hijinx: Reality Check! (which I have not read, but I believe it involves catgirls and also “the internet”).

Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat; Reality Check [Studio Tavicat]