RASL was, I think, Jeff Smith's next book after he finished Bone. It ran 15 issues across 4 years. I remember a little discussion of it, here and there, on the comics blogosphere back when it started, but not enough to where I had any idea what it was about. I was pronouncing the title in my head like "wrassle", and assumed it was some sort of fight comic. It is not.
"RASL" is what people call Robert Joseph Johnson, who worked as a research scientist for a covert government project with his friend, Miles, and Maya, Miles' wife. Who Rob was sleeping with. Rob began to have concerns about the project and, unable to convince Miles to scrap it, sabotaged the whole thing and escaped via a different project. One that enables him to cross "The Drift" into parallel universes. Now Rob makes a living stealing things - like paintings - for people by slipping into those parallel universes, stealing the version that exists there, and coming home.
The series starts with Rob landing in the wrong universe after a heist, then getting attacked by a reptilian-looking guy that seems able to track him. After 2 years the government's caught up, and they want their stuff. Specifically, they want some journals that belonged to Tesla that were supposed to stay locked up, but Rob got hold.
Tesla is woven all through the book. Smith brings in the Philadelphia Experiment as an attempt to create the magnetic torsion field Tesla proposed as an invisibility cloak of sorts, but it actually moves things through space (and time.) The project Miles, Maya and Robert are working on is an idea Tesla had to draw power from the planet's ionosphere. Most of issues 6 and 12 are a Tesla biography. His rise, his "war of the currents" with Edison, his "World System," using the power of the Earth itself for a dozen different things (Rob says a test of the World System in Long Island is what caused the Tunguska event in Siberia.)
I think the idea is Tesla had these ideas, but initially only partially understood what he was dealing with. Once he gained a better (though likely still incomplete) grasp, he backed away in horror of the potential danger. Rob and Miles have repeated the cycle decades later. They were fascinated by Tesla and his work, but thanks to Tesla's journals, Rob now knows how bad an idea this is (though not bad enough he'll destroy the journals.) But he can't convince Miles, and won't show him the journals as proof, because he thinks that will only spur Miles on. He doesn't trust his friend, and maybe that's because Rob knows he's been a shitty friend himself.
That said, I don't understand the significance of the non-verbal, emaciated little girl that keeps popping up wherever Rob goes. He meets a guy at an abandoned gas station in one of the universes who claims the girl is God, but *shrugs*. She saves Rob's life late in the book, by getting repeatedly shot, where as one version of her falls, another completes the next step, then falls as it's killed, and so on.
There's an ongoing debate between Rob and Sal, the agent chasing him, about whether these are distinct parallel universes (Rob's position), or just shadows Rob is creating by traveling to them (Sal.) I think we're meant to take Rob's position as accurate, or at least more humane, but Rob's actions don't match his words. He uses the other worlds as a way to make money, and treats versions of people he knows back home as interchangeable. In his universe, Rob has a sex worker friend/acquaintance/hook-up named Annie, but if he's not in his universe, he'll visit an Annie in whichever universe he is in, if she happens to live in the same place and do the same work. When Sal kills "his" Annie, Rob tries to protect that other one. He's treating them like spares, or a resource (in this case, salve for his guilty conscience), not much different than what he says the government will do if they get his work and try to strip-mine the other worlds for resources.
(This probably ties into an old discussion we see Rob had with "his" Annie at one point. Rob is fond of saying it's never to late to fix things, but Annie points out Rob never actually fixes anything, he just patches over them. He tries breaking things off with Maya, but won't come clean with Miles. He can't protect his Annie, he just latches onto another one.)
Also, Sal tells Rob the reason they never meet themselves on these jaunts is they "subsume" that universe's version. Sal seems very concerned about being unique, simply by the fact of his existence, so he can't accept those other universes may be equivalent to his. (To the extent Rob cares about "unique," I think he would define it by what you do, rather than the mere fact of existence.) And, assuming Sal's correct, that result runs against the idea of the other universes as distinct. Why are Rob and Sal always taking over the form of the Rob or Sal of the universe they've reached? Why are they never pushed aside, to exist separately, or caught in the back of the mind of the one they've merged with?
Though it does make me wonder if that's why Rob was having blackouts at one point. He thinks it's because moving through the Drift is hard on the body, and he was doing it too many times in a short span, but I don't know. Supposedly his universe is the only one where Tesla lived long enough to try and develop the World System idea, but he doesn't know how many realities there are, so he can't be sure. Maybe there's another Rob out there, running the same race.
