Webcomic Weekly: ‘How To Solve A Rubik’s Cube’ – A Beautiful Unexpected Love Story
by Richard Bruton
Webcomic Weekly, Comicon’s guide to all that’s wonderful in the world of online comics. (And where it’s best to concentrate on the webcomic rather than the often completely ill-described weekly bit). This week, the glorious How to solve a Rubik’s Cube.
Author ‘goodlouse‘ describes the short 16 pages of How To Solve A Rubik’s Cube as “a gay valentine’s / anniversary comic about trying to impress a boy.”
But it’s so much more than that, it’s just beautiful, it’s heartfelt, it’s vulnerable, it’s funny, it’s just so sweet yet so effective. You simple won’t be able to read it and not be absolutely charmed by it.
What starts as a how-to guide to solving a Rubik’s Cube, complete with simple drawn diagrams soon morphs into something else. We switch from the Rubik’s solving diagrams to the story itself and back again, with everything laid out in a super clean, border-less, panel-less fashion that gives the whole thing a freshness…
So, how the hell do you transpose a comic about solving a Rubik’s Cube with a perfectly sweet and beautifully done little love story?
Well, you introduce a boy of course. In this case, it’s the narrator’s Step 6…
And from then onwards, it’s just a beautifully done little tale of old-fashioned romance with a modern twist.
In a comic with so few pages and where so much of it is actually concerned with the physical solving of the Cube, to be able to create such a delicious sense of the developing relationship so well, to be able to communicate so perfectly the feelings involved, the excitement, the tentative nature of it all, it’s just all there in the few words, the phrasing, the way things are moving along, all of it so familiar to us as we watch with anticipation to see where it’s going and how they’re going to get together and how the solving of the Cube is suddenly so intimately connected with the two of them getting together. It could be silly, even ridiculous if it wasn’t written so well and so naturally.
Interspersed with the Cube solving we have little moments of honesty, vulnerability, such as this…
That lovely turn of phrase and emotive description of the turn of the Cube being so like hugging the object of your affection – that’s everything that makes this comic, short as it is, one of the sweetest, one of the best things I’ve read.
It’s beautifully affecting and the way that things come together, the way that THEY come together, is described and drawn so well that you find yourself so immediately involved in this simple story and desperately want things to work out – and no surprise, it does. But the joy of the story, the perfection of the story is how they get together, how the ending is played out. It’s sweet but it’s also surprisingly sensual, cleverly done, perfectly done.
Simply put, How To Solve A Rubik’s Cube is one of my favourite things I’ve read so far this year. A beautiful, moving, cleverly done love story told in the most unexpected of ways.
You can read How To Solve A Rubik’s Cube here on Twitter – it’s a wonderful, heartfelt, heartwarming piece of comics. Follow goodlouse, go check out his Etsy store.
