RanXerox

RanXerox, by Stefano Tamburini and Tanino Liberatore, is an Italian Science Fiction comic from 1978. Coming into the story with no prior knowledge of the narrative or any of the characters, I thought I was beginning to enter a comic of an entirely different genre. The story opens up as a group of people dealing drugs – and going through the inevitable drama that goes along with that. Lubna, Ranx’s love interest, talks about being able to control Ranx completely. In the subsequent panel, Lubna is shown to have removed the top of his cranium (like a cap) and begins to tinker with the mechanical inner workings of the man’s mind. Not knowing that this was a Science Fiction comic, I thought the authors were speaking metaphorically, that Lubna was able to control Ranx because he loved her, and was therefore transformed into a piece of machinery powered not by conscious, rational thought, but by the whims of his almost disturbingly young lover. A few panels later, however, I realized that Ranx was, in fact, a robotic man (whom I later learned was built from parts of a Xerox machine, of which fact the name is indicative). This misunderstanding proved to be a fairly good indicator of the theme behind this comic. Every single character is either being used or using someone, usually for sexual reasons. Lubna, on several occasions, uses Ranx to make money while simultaneously cheating on him, then tries to assuage him with sexual favors – these favors are mainly for her benefit, however, as his robotic nature does not allow him to reap any sort of enjoyment from these exploits. Through my misunderstanding of RanXerox, I was clued into the narrative to come much faster than I would have otherwise.