The Undisputed King Of Nothing – Issue 1
By Paul Stapleton

November: A new strain of flu hits Britain.
March: Spring wakes up to an empty world.
But a single life abides.
Even nothing needs its king
That is a cracking four line back-cover blurb right there. Cracking. Made me really keen to see just what Stapleton had for us, whether he was going to head for downbeat thought piece, a variation on the post-apocalyptic zombie thing, or something else.
However…. in all honesty, that was the high point of the comic. Which sounds a horrible thing to say, but putting it into context will help. There’s a fair bit about The Undisputed King Of Nothing (title, concept, setting, tone) that works really well and I’ll be interested to see where Stapleton takes it. The thing is, that back-cover blurb had me thinking it was going to be really, really good. And it’s not. It’s good enough, but there’s too many faults to live up to the hype.
It starts beautifully, and from just these panels I thought I was in for a real treat. Maybe I just like moody shots of landscape too much, I don’t know:

The whole issue is one man, post apocalypse, the “single life” of the blurb, who spends all day, every day, walking the desolate, broken streets, looking for any tiny sign of anyone else. And he hasn’t seen anyone for weeks. Food, power, his teeth – all worrysome. The answer he finds is to immerse himself into a daily routine, cycling, foraging, stealing, searching. Day after day, cycling through the car-strewn streets.
To keep himself from going mad, he narrates, he thinks, then he writes it all down. Or perhaps, just perhaps, he’s already gone mad, and these meandering thoughts are the perfect example of it. Mad or not, he’s the last one alive as far as he knows, and he’s barely surviving.

There’s one point where Stapleton has his protagonist say this:
“It’s amazing really. I have so many things to get done yet I still find the time to write this horseshit every day.”
Please, don’t get the idea I’m accusing Stapleton of writing horseshit, I’m really not. But he has overwritten it, and that almost seems like, right at the end of this first chapter, to be his way of explaining it. It’s written this way becuase that’s what he wanted to get over in the issue, the isolation, the loneliness, the desperate desire to hear something, even if it’s only the sound of your voice inside your head as it goes down on the page I suppose.
But to me all that thinking just overwhelms the story, and certainly overwhelms the artwork:

Thing is, you might not think the same. Maybe it is just me. I know I bloody hate the sort of people who seem determined in this life to take my precious moment of quiet and fill it with their incessant blabber. And that’s what this feels like. I wouldn’t like this bloke in real life, and he annoys me in comic form.
Yeah, I know he’s thinking it all, and that’s just what I’d do as well, but on a comic page, thoughts have substance and a volume, and sadly these are overwhelming and deafening.

But right at the end. With just that moment, with the character actually interjecting over his own thoughts, with a “hang on” – then it gets interesting again. Enough to rescue it, enough to make me want to read a second issue? Yeah, I reckon so.
Sure, his art is much, much better when he’s focusing on the landscape rather than the man, as his figure work’s not up to much. But I can cope with that. I don’t know if I can hack another issue of deafening thinking all over the pages, but I’ll be around to see what happens.
You can buy The Undisputed King Of Nothing at Stapleton’s website.
Sat, Feb 4, 2012 posted by Richard
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