Comic Review: RICK AND MORTY: KINGDOM BALLS #2

The second installment of ‘Kingdom Balls’ from Oni Press has dropped, and it’s just as awesome, if not slightly more awesome, than the first issue! This time around, Rick, Morty and Jerry have moved on to the next logical story realm after Man v Man – Man v Nature. 

The annoying and ingenious thing about all of the ‘there’s only X number of stories/narratives/plots in the world” arguments is that every single one of them feels right when you hear it. If somebody says there are only seven stories, then it feels like every story fits into those seven categories. If it’s four, then it’s four. And the categories are always different, but they all always work – it’s like a self-fulfilling philosophical concept. 

‘Man versus nature’ is probably the first ever narrative structure – it explores the many, many permutations in which humans can come into conflict with the beings of the natural world. The most obvious example of this is when a person or people are forced to confront some wild force, be it tigers or hurricane or measles or ocean. Along the way, you’re going to learn a bunch of stuff about resilience, or fragility, or some third thing. Questions of an existential nature are gonna get asked, no doubt. It’s about survival, the limits of control, the intrinsic power of nature, and the profundity of the  interdependence between humans and their ecosystem. It’s important to note that a lot of the time, Man v Nature is, actually, Man v Self, a la Moby Dick. Ahab technically died by being storm-lashed to a whale, but he really died from old tyme dudes not knowing how to talk about their feelings.

So this is like that, but in this case the ‘nature’ in question is ‘Gargan, the Nature Man,’ which would bring us right back to Man v Man, if we weren’t clearly in Man v Self-land.  Rick’s refusal to give up on his dream has turned him into a sort of Neil Gaiman inspired shadow man, and ennui is beginning to set in as Rick sits on a dream beach, ruminating on the  insignificance of humans in the vastness of the dream-world. 

Kingdom Balls #2 is another beautifully rendered, sloppily deconstructed, fabulous mess of silliness that hides its lofty intellectualism behind a lot of excellent, testicled battle scenes. Things have not quite reached the epitome of high strangeness yet, but this comic is still delightfully weird, and there are still two more issues dangling in  our collective future. I highly recommend!