Frezno's Comics Challenge: April 2024 (The Many Deaths Of Laila Starr)

God damn. These comics just keep getting better and better, and we're only a third of the way through the year. There's a real kinetic energy to these books, and even though I'm still an amateur comics critic I can still see it. I haven't been delving into things like panel composition on the page, unless it's been especially chaotic like with Of Thunder And Lightning, but I am just out here living and vibing. Living and vibing is as good a way as any to segue into The Many Deaths Of Laila Starr, so let us just stop stalling and dive right into it because this book did impress me a great deal based on its vibes and its musings.

The Many Deaths Of Laila Starr, by Ram V and Filipe Andrade, is a book about just that. No, not just the many deaths of Laila Starr (of which there are only five, not that many but let's not be pedantic), but a book about the very nature of life and death. We have begun these by playing color theorist and analyzing the main palette of the book and what that means, so why stop there? Laila Starr's first pages are awash in beautiful pastels, all the vibrancy of bisexual mood lighting giving life to the proceedings as we explore 2019 Mumbai. That's the color scheme defining the book, and it means exactly that. Life. Vibrant and beautiful. The colors are bright, and there's a real sense of beauty as well. The titular Laila Starr is a bombshell of glamour and beauty, dark hair and red lips and gold earrings as we see her exhaling cigarette smoke. I'm going to talk about the smoke in a bit, trust me, we'll be doing a whole thing.

Life, as well as death, are ever-present in the book as they are in reality. That dichotomy plays out over issue 1. As Laila Starr falls to her death, the child who will invent immortality is born. Darius Shah is life, and Laila Starr is Death. Quite literally so, in fact, as Death herself is fired following the birth of Darius and given her retirement via inhabiting the recently-deceased frame of Laila Starr. The glimpse of the afterlife we get is just as colorful and beautiful as the mortal coil, and though it's a culture and faith system that is not my own I can admire its beauty and representation in this book from here. From here, Death herself as Laila Starr wants her job back, and wants to kill Darius. That gets us into the book, and the sheer beauty that follows.

The remaining four issues are thoughtful musings on the nature of life and death, as we check in with Darius at various points of his life as he encounters death. He also encounters Death, as Laila Starr, who influences his life and thinking in different philosophical ways before dying herself and being revived years later. Thinking of my own synchronicities that haven't been noted to you all yet, it reminds me of the plotline from the second season of the Quantum Leap reboot where quantum leaper Ben Song continues to encounter a woman named Hannah at various points in her life. I promise I'll talk about that sometime over the summer, but we have the paradox of Laila Starr, dying but also undying, maintaining her youthful beauty for decades from the perspective of Darius.

It's issue 3, where Laila and the 20 year-old Darius get to talk at a party, that really solidified a lot of the theming and visual metaphor of this book for me. There's a beautiful page of four panels in which we focus on Darius on the left, while a burning cigarette being smoked by Laila dominates the right side, burning to ash more and more with each successive panel, the entire scene awash with those beautiful pastels. Smoke is a major factor in the book, and that theme is found in both the words and the visuals. As Laila muses to Darius, the point of life is to be smoked. Human mortality as a cigarette, finite and burning itself away with every second and every drag, but also being enjoyed by the smoker. Smoking itself perfectly fits the dichotomy of the book. It is depicted as this glamorous and beautiful thing, wisps of the stuff inked and brushed in those amazing pastels as it comes out of the mouths of beautiful people like Laila. On the other hand, it's smoking. One of the worst things you can voluntarily do to your body, inhaling carcinogens and nicotine and hastening your own death. Smoking has all the vibrancy of life in the book, but its stark reality is death itself. Hell, a stray cigarette causing a fire is what kills Laila again at the end of this issue.

This fundamental fact of the universe is shown in the final issue, when the elderly Darius reveals he already discovered the secret to immortality but never used it. When we see the flashback to his shocked discovery and then hiding it away in a shoebox, immortality is depicted as rainbow-hued smoke. Darius, like all of us, has known death as well as life. His angered fury at Laila revealing she is Death in the fourth issue has the pastels melt away, replaced with domestic colors and a more vibrant red as he shatters a glass in his hand. In the end, we live because we desire to live, and the miracle of life was living itself. Darius, in life, finds meaning in death and rejecting immortality. Death, in turn, finds meaning in life itself. It's a beautiful sentiment, presented in beautiful and glamorous visuals and colors. This was a standout book, and I appreciate how these are just getting better and better. See you next time for another one of these, hopefully knocking my socks off even more.