Comic Book / Blast

"It's the blast... it changes you."

"I was suspended between earth and sky, brought into the world for a second time. I was weightless... me! It was all so clear. I saw the world as it truly is, not as I had perceived it. And not only was I part of it, but I was of its very nature... its origin. I glimpsed a limitless world, cleansed of all morality... and it was magnificent."

—Polza Mancini

Blast is a 2012 comic by French indie cartoonist Manu Larcenet. The story follows the doomed journey of Polza Mancini, a homeless drifter and former writer who's being held in police custody for unspecified crimes. At the behest of the detectives questioning him, Polza begins to recount his life story to them. It all started when he experienced what he calls "the blast," a vision he had of a world without morality or social guidelines. Enamored by the idea of a life without restraint, he decides to abandon civil society to live hedonistically on the fringes of human civilization. What follows is a dark and esoteric character study of a man who's willingly forsaken his humanity to become a beast.

There are four books in the series, which are titled as such:

• 1. Dead Weight
• 2. The Apocalypse According to Saint Jacky
• 3. Head First
• 4. I Hope the Buddhists Are Wrong

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Tropes:

• The Alcoholic: Polza has a long-standing drinking problem that's taken a toll on his physical and mental well-being. He somehow hasn't died from liver failure even though he drinks straight gin everyday and routinely has life-threatening nosebleeds because his blood can't coagulate. Polza rationalizes his constant drinking as a tool for self-discovery on his journey, an idea the detectives are immediately skeptical of.
• Big Fun:
  • In a twisted sort of way, Polza often acts like this during his travels. He repeatedly shares his gin with the friendlier people he comes across and makes lively conversation with them. He's very wry and jovial while talking to the detectives, which they rightfully find unnerving.
  • Saint Jacky comes across like this as well initially, given that he's an eccentric and cheery drug dealer who lives in a make-shift underground bunker.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Polza is implied to have one at the outset of the narrative. It's increasingly delved into as the series progresses.
• Driven to Suicide: Polza does this after learning that he killed Carol.
  "I hope the Buddhists are wrong. I hope I never come back."
• Eloquent in My Native Tongue: At one point Polza meets a Serbian day-laborer named Bojan. Despite barely being able to speak French, he's routinely referred to as a "poet" by the other workers and is shown to be surprisingly erudite if the translating they do is to be believed.
• Even Evil Has Standards: For all of Polza's vile and amoral behavior, there are certain actions that are too far for him.
  • At the end of the second book, Polza is horrified when he stumbles across Saint Jacky having just raped and murdered a young woman. Polza is visibly shaken and ends up with lingering traumatic memories of the event.
  • In the fourth book, Polza is similarly shocked at discovering that Roland is a serial rapist rather than a mere peeping tom. Having been raped himself, Polza understandably doesn't take this revelation well.
• Fat Bastard: Polza's weight is drawn attention to multiple times. It's not just that he's fat, but he's also shown to be a disgusting slob. He doesn't bathe regularly, he wears the same clothes for days on end (which are frequently stained by his own blood and filth), and he eats with his mouth open while literally cramming food down his gullet. Decency is one of many things Polza left behind with the blast.
• Fat Slob: As mentioned above, Polza deliberately strove to be filthy, unrefined, and hedonistic while wandering the countryside.
  "I lived drunk like you've never been. Dirty like you'll never be! So that I would not be repulsive in my smell as well as my looks, I had always made it a point of honor to obey a regime of strict cleanliness... in the forest, I reeked like you can't even imagine!"
• Foreshadowing:
  • When Polza happens upon Jacky standing over his most recent victim, Jacky ominously tells him that "we're the same."
  • After Polza survives running across a busy highway, he experiences the blast. A full-page illustration shows a humongous moai sitting on the highway with a single car approaching in the distance. We see this same panel again in the epilogue but with Polza standing by himself to the right of the moai. The lone car shown earlier is revealed to be a police cruiser, which was responding to a call about a dazed man wandering around on the highway. Polza murdered the two officers responding to the scene while he was in his trance.
  • At one point Carol is applying make-up on Polza's face to make him look like the grim reaper. She jokingly brings up a trite saying about how "you don't put on makeup to hide your face, but to reveal its secrets." Polza is a serial killer. His secret is that death follows in his wake.
  • While living with the Oakleys, the police visit the household to ask questions about a murder in the area. Polza and the Oakleys assume that the murder in question was performed by Jacky, who they likewise assume has blamed Polza for the crime. As it turns out, the police were investigating the deaths of the officers Polza murdered on the highway. Polza was indeed the culprit.
  • Throughout the narrative, Polza is haunted by visions of his skeletal, emaciated father. Polza seems to feel an unspecific sense of guilt and dread whenever he thinks about him. If the epilogue is to be believed, Polza first experienced the blast after strangling his father to death while he laid in his hospital bed.
• Faux Affably Evil: Polza swings back and forth between being this and Affably Evil. At times he seems like an intelligent, witty, and thoughtful man who has a deep appreciation for nature. But more often than not he shows himself to be a smug and detestable scumbag on top of being violently unstable.
• Genius Bruiser: In addition to his intelligence, Polza is a lot stronger and more agile than he looks. At one point the detectives describe him as being more like "a cornered animal that would do anything to survive than some obese couch potato."
• Go Mad from the Revelation: The eponymous blast is an unusual take on this trope. While the blast compels Polza to adopt a dark new worldview, he's not even remotely shocked or horrified by what he sees. If anything, he's overjoyed about the revelations he experiences.
• Gonk: Most of the characters qualify as this but Polza especially is bizarre and unappealing to look at. It's not just that he's a morbidly obese man who makes unnerving facial expressions, but his proportions are rather odd-looking. He has a tiny head on a huge, broad-shouldered body, which almost makes him resemble a bird perched on top of a moai statue. The exaggerated way the characters look is sharply contrasted by how realistically their surroundings are drawn, making the world they inhabit feel even more eerie and threatening.
• In Vino Veritas: Polza references this trope in the second book while discussing how alcohol has helped him discover who he really is deep down.
  "Being drunk is not a loss of control. It's a liberation. It's the only way to learn who you are without frightening yourself."
• Heroic BSoD: Polza undergoes this when he first experiences the blast. He comes out of it a changed man.
• Humanoid Abomination: Instead of a nose, Polza's father is inexplicably drawn with a massive and gnarled beak. He's the only character in the comic drawn like this and no one draws attention to it. Near the end of his life he barely looks human, with the beak and his emaciated body making him look like an inhuman monster. Polza acts with appropriate fear and trepidation whenever he has visions of his father coming back to haunt him in this form.
• Hypocrite: Although Polza portrays himself as being proudly amoral, there are moments where he's morally outraged by the things he sees (not without good reason though).
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It's not abundantly clear what the blasts are. Polza theorizes that the blast is a gift placed upon him by the universe for becoming a "moai." Putting aside Polza's quasi-mystical musings, it appears they're either seizures or psychotic breaks from reality. They're usually triggered by significant stress, injury, the use of potent drugs, or unpredictable emotional stimuli.
• Nature Is Not Nice: This is part of why Polza loves the beauty of the natural world. Rather than romanticizing it, he appreciates how uncomplicated it is in its harshness and brutality.
  "The natural world knows no morality, no justice, no free will, no reason, no values, no obligations."
• Patricide: The epilogue reveals that Polza murdered his father, which is what exposed him to the blast in the first place.
• Rule of Symbolism: Birds and especially owls are a recurring motif throughout the story. Polza visually resembles one because of his nose and he's routinely shown being fascinated by the birds he encounters in his travels. It's possible that the owl shown at the end of the epilogue is a reincarnated Polza.
• Sanity Slippage: This is a possible explanation for some of the more bizarre things Polza sees (or thinks he sees), such as the dream he has about Carol Oakley long before meeting her. Polza is remarkably candid about it.
  "I had just been living alone in the woods for over three months, talking to trees, to rocks, getting blackout drunk everyday. You don't think that'd have an effect on your state of mind?"
• Sinister Schnoz: Polza has a long and beak-like nose, which is contrasted by the roundness of his head.
• Stout Strength: Polza is surprisingly strong and fleet-footed in spite of weighing three hundred pounds. Throughout the story he's shown to have no problem hiking long distances, sleeping in the wilderness for months on end, and outrunning people chasing him. He's also strong enough to have repeatedly beat people to death with his bare fists without doing lasting damage to his hands.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: Whenever Polza experiences the blast, the world around him is depicted as crude, brightly-colored scribbles that look like they were drawn by a child. It's suggested that this is how he's perceiving specific objects, animals, and people. What he and the reader don't see are the violent murders he commits while in this trance-like state.
• Title Drop: Happens in each book at one point or another.
• Unreliable Narrator: It's quickly established that Polza tends to withhold information, consciously or otherwise. In the first book, it's revealed that Polza was truncating slightly while discussing the circumstances surrounding his brother Trolezin's death. Polza merely says he died in a car accident. The detectives later reveal to Polza they know he'd been driving the car... and that he'd been massively drunk that evening.
• Villainous Breakdown: After he learns that he murdered Carol, Polza has a truly apocalyptic break-down. A series of disturbing memories flash before his eyes, culminating in red-tinged images of Carol, Trolezin, and his father, all of whom died by his hand.
• Villain Protagonist: Polza is a gleefully amoral and self-interested man who feels no shame for any of the horrible behavior he gets up to.
• Wham Line: A few across the entire story.
  • In the second book, Polza discovers that his associate Jacky has just stabbed a young heroin addict to death. Jacky tells him "she's not my first."
  • Carol delivers one in book four when she tells Polza about the true nature of Roland's legal troubles.
  "Is that what he told you? My dad didn't go to prison for ogling women. He also raped them."
• Wham Episode: The epilogue. It reveals that Polza was a serial murderer and that he left a trail of bodies during his travels
• Wicked Cultured: In spite of being a homeless alcoholic, Polza is very poetic and articulate. Given that he used to be a writer, it makes sense for him to have such an erudite demeanor. His tendency to philosophize at length annoys the detectives.