Rodney R. Rodney: Omnibus
Writer/Artist: Violine Bria
Print designer: Patrick Crotty
Publisher: Self-published / $35
Winter 2025
A local cryptid? He lives down the block. His name is Rodney and he knows how to pick locks. Then he walks around with his hands upside down, like that scene in The Exorcist. Violine Bria always seems to have Rodney brandishing knives, hedge clippers, and sickles. In one Rodney R. Rodney strip, he sold a lock of his hair for $10 to buy pruners. The porch camera caught him standing outside the front door again at 3 a.m.
And then all the murders happen. A man who looks like a smiling Slender Man is wanted by the police. Looks like someone we know. Between getting killed and a neighbor so haunted and eerily ubiquitous that you might wish you could just get killed so you don’t see him anywhere, hmm, not the best place to live, this suburb. But it’s cheap.
That’s modern horror. Monsters are bad, but have you met your neighbor? JFC convenience store girl. Life is a nightmare without mass murderers. And now, due to a shortage of staff at work, we have to hire another Kagemusha. And it’s modern, the complete opposite of “If I had a cell phone, the story would have ended.” A distraught fiancée, a wild old man, and an imaginative and anxious teenager are all on the same subreddit, trying to figure out who Rodney really is.
Briat has great style. A manga of the perfect level as a manga. The character is loose and expressive, but Rodney still stands out. He’s not built like us. Human limbs don’t work like that. No one should be turning purple and smiling like that. Bryatt also excels at exploiting the boundaries of shadows: visible yet hidden, clearly hidden yet difficult to see. Enough art detail to have a background for Rodney to haunt. always.
There’s a subtlety to the printing process that allows a simple strip to mysteriously help capture the feeling of two different worlds: the strip and the book. Briat collaborated with Peow2’s Patrick Crotty on the print version of the omnibus. It is a duochrome work of purple and indigo, and is in the same widescreen book format as “Autumn Frog” (comes with a slipcase). Briat makes great use of color as a storyteller, but it’s also just a great looking book.
This is a strip, so even though the format is different, the size feels familiar, like a strip collection. The kind you’d find in the humor section of a bookstore, not the graphic novel shelf. But gourmet? The printing and presentation make this book feel bespoke, as if it were sitting on a shelf of graphic novels rather than next to Garfield’s Weighing at the Scholastic Book Fair.
That said, this book is extremely interesting. Rodney is a truly infuriating guy, and his comics are full of situations where Sonic Boom leaves town fast enough to break his lease. Bryatt taps into the “right behind you” energy of slasher movies and translates that tension into some very awkward humor. Now you have to talk to Rodney, since he hasn’t killed you (yet). Please drive him to Home Depot. Look at the photo he showed on his cell phone.
I love reading episodes of one big manuscript like this. Omnibus readers can enjoy both the strip style and the ability to focus on the mood of the moment, without the pressure of moving the plot forward. The book also benefits from telling the story that way, as the characters are always given room to grow. A spectacular, palpable, slow burn that comes from spending time with the people in the book and watching them change.
So Rodney R. Rodney is a sitcom, a slice of life, a flaw. By depicting small interactions that are normal and relatable, readers will let their guard down. The threat begins. The strip heaves with mounting tension, but the bubble only bursts when their paths cross with a scared but still goofy figure. It’s Briatt who’s messing with you, not Rodney. This guy has a lot of sharp objects, is very opinionated but slow-witted, and is allergic to respecting comfort zones, but he hasn’t killed anyone in the group chat yet.
“Oh, you mean Rodney?” Over and over again, something that looks very dire—several strips worth of paranoia—completely collapses when someone in town who doesn’t care about Rodney’s unique approach shows up…all of it. good. His coffee order is just as disgusting as you’d expect. His grasp of personal space is just as bad as his actual grip, which is inexplicably sticky. So maybe they care about that. But they are not afraid of him. But you’ll never get used to that guy.
Then the plot re-emerges so it can take a twist. Part of it is creative misdirection. Most are assumptions. Each chapter unfolds as a series of suburban mainstays, from mowing the lawn to trick-or-treating to sleeping on the couch, but the episodes tip over with no resolution to the series’ bottomless tension.
The readers, who are the repositories of this horror, find meaning in the same clues as the characters, narrate the mysterious murders that occur in the town as they see them, and free Briat to act in unexpected ways. Clarify reader misconceptions.
The story is there and always has been. The monster is always waiting, the source of all tension and fear is always present, emerging from the darkness, as if stepping out of the shadows. The little pieces of history depicted throughout the series are breadcrumbs leading to dark and bloody places. And is it a heart of darkness? Oh, you mean Rodney?
Rodney R. Rodney can still be read online from Webtoon. Original print installments are sold on Violaine Briat’s webshop, as well as RRR: The Omnibus, where niche comics and books are sold.
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