A Complete Lowlife (2001)

Writer and illustrator Ed Brubaker has gone on to bigger things with DC Comics and Marvel since this interesting little indie project. Full disclosure, I don't know any of that but I picked up on this back then as a partisan of Harvey Pekar, R. Crumb, Joe Matt, and all their comics-as-autobiography followers. So this "complete" Lowlife amounts to a handful of stories that appeared across a series of five comic books with two publishers. They are plainly in the vein of Pekar—Brubaker acknowledges him in an introduction—telling true stories of youth, petty crime, boredom, drug use, and immature relationships. My poor old tired eyes had some problems with some of the tiny hand printing, but most of these stories were entertaining and full of pathos. The characters are the usual motley assortment of obsessive fan types, celebrating cool but kind of nerdy. There's a great anecdote in one story about a job he takes at a collectors' bookstore, where he learns about the trade, sees others ripping the owner off, and starts ripping him off too. He feels shame about it but is defensive too, and then his feelings are hurt when he learns the owner knew about it all the time and now scorns him. At one time I might have liked the girlfriend stories best but now they just make me sad. Brubaker's stories might suffer a little because he is withholding detail, but there's a pretty fine balance when it comes to lacerating self-confession. Brubaker has some reasonably ugly stories to tell about himself, but even across the space of this series, which started and ended in the '90s, he seems to have turned out all right. One thing you can't miss is that eventually he abandoned the memoir mode and went more or less directly to superheroes. He's won a lot of awards too so he must be pretty good. He's a writer now almost exclusively and his interests are in the noir style and hard-boiled detective fiction. Just in 2019 he won an Eisner Award for "Best Graphic Album – New" for a project called My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies, which is apparently a rehab story. It's not that hard to see how he got there from here. But my heart is closer to here—closer to these obsessive semi-narcissistic nerds working out their personal problems as they grow up, more often than not ineptly. I think Brubaker is also a pretty good illustrator, though on the simple and primitive side. I can see why he chose to work with others later but I like the unadorned style of this whole project.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Blankets (2003)

Craig Thompson's graphic novel was highly regarded on its release—Time magazine named it the best of its kind that year—and it holds up pretty well. Set in Wisconsin and Michigan, it's a coming-of-age memoir of a poignant high school period, remembered almost 10 years later. Graphic novels often seem to lend themselves well to memoir, partly perhaps because drawing styles are inevitably personal, like autographs. (This still doesn't explain Harvey Pekar, who wrote the scripts for his comic book memoirs and then dragooned other artists into illustrating them.) Blankets has some interesting and unexpected features. Both Thompson and Raina, the girl he briefly falls for, come from conservative Christian milieus. Thompson appears to have left it behind since. But he remembers when things like Bible verses mattered as much as anything else in life, if not more. At the same time, Bible verses were competing for his attention with Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Bjork. He always wanted to draw, and the art here is always good, often inspired. The title plays on blankets of snow, a blanket that Raina makes for him, and the blankets he shared with his younger brother Phil, with whom he slept for years growing up. In many ways, the story is as much about Phil as Raina. Thompson's love affair is one of those strange high school things. They meet in a church camp. They live in separate states. They exchange letters. Infatuation grows. She invites him to visit for two weeks and tender young teen love follows. They're both Christians, both underage, both under the watchful eye of all available adults. It's never a story of sexual awakening because it couldn't be. As it happens, Raina's parents are divorcing. Her father has recently moved to his own apartment. This is a terrible calamity for the Christian family, and that's what Raina is reaching out of. So, unsurprisingly, the love affair is doomed. But getting there is a nice story—too candid in some places, too precious in others, but mostly a swift and compelling tale of recognizable people with recognizable problems, making their way by their best lights. Graphic novels like this make me think I really need to look at more of them.

In case it's not at the library.

A History of Violence (1997)

I guess it makes sense that my favorite part of this graphic novel is the art by Vince Locke. The story didn't much impress me in the movie version by David Cronenberg and it doesn't much here either. I understand the temptation to go to the device of New York City Italian-American organized crime as the most heinous evil the mind can conceive, but it's old now, so old. Can we please have another brand of monolithic evil please? The story here goes well over the top to a much greater degree even than the movie, into areas that are frankly unbelievable, such as holding a hostage for 20 years and torturing said hostage all that time. With blowtorches, pliers, crowbars, etc. For 20 years? Man, that's harsh. Locke's illustration style feels scratchy and sketchy and rushed, black and white, and some very serious cross-hatching, but I came to like it a great deal. On the downside, his skill level with portraiture is so weak I had a hard time separating characters from one another, which was really a critical lack at some junctures. I liked the ways he compensated it, establishing certain elements, such as cars, by their shapes, and then varying the angles of view from close-up to medium to long and back and all around, recognizable by the shape. Lots of great interiors, some really nice cityscapes, and a solid sense for propelling a story. That could as well have been writer John Wagner, of course. I don't know much about him—I was slightly familiar with Judge Dredd in the '80s, which never made much impression though I liked the premise a lot. In the nuts and bolts of this graphic novel the storytelling is perfectly fine. I'm just tired of some of the things I've already mentioned and others: the Mafia, children in danger, sadism pushed into farce, the Ethan Edwards who's got what it takes, and similar nonsense. In conclusion, I'm not sure whether or not I can recommend it, and I suppose that means I am actually not recommending it at all. But hey, YMMV.

In case it's not at the library.

Watchmen (1986-1987)

I found out about Watchmen in, of all places, a fanzine for mystery enthusiasts called The Armchair Detective, for which I briefly wrote book reviews in return for free books in the late '80s (such as Rock Critic Murders by Jesse Sublett, which they sent me but I never managed to finish, not because it isn't done well). The Watchmen review was buried in a column I read there regularly, "J'accuse!" by William L. DeAndrea. He was an interesting writer with wide-ranging interests, but it was unusual for anyone connected with the magazine to acknowledge a comic book, let alone discuss one, let alone rave enthusiastically about it. By the time I read the column the comic book run was over and it had been gathered into the graphic novel most of us know it by now, truly one of the great comic books (or graphic novels, if I must) we will have for a very long time. As promised by DeAndrea's review, Watchmen is a huge one. Writer Alan Moore (it somehow seems insufficient to call him just the writer, but there you go) takes the same psychological starting point as the book's virtual companion in comic book history, which preceded it by about seven months, Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns. But where Miller's Batman is a near-future tale, Moore sets Watchmen back in the "golden age" of comic books, to the very point of the original imagining, circa 1937, and reimagines it as if it all really happened, a fad of the transitional times from the Great Depression to World War II when real people dressed up in colorful costumes and "fought crime." As Miller did, Moore also wonders what kind of people they would be, and comes to essentially the same (obvious) conclusion: damaged human beings, revenge-driven psychopaths, and such. Only one character in Moore's pantheon here has super-powers, a Silver-Surfer-like figure produced as a matter of nuclear technology in the mid-'40s who is practically omnipotent. Otherwise they are well-meaning thugs or insecure but handy dweebs with maximum brain power. Moore's storytelling style is allusive and fastidiously detailed, supplying backstory via appendices to the early sections, staged as excerpts from an autobiography, published histories, odd critical exegeses, police files, and so forth. It may be a little awkward, in terms of comic-book storytelling, but it provides necessary context, and one welcomes it. I welcomed it. Also—and I think everybody talks about this sooner or later, but it's still remarkable—Dave Gibbons's illustrations are deceptively generic. By the midpoint the style becomes uncannily appropriate to the story, down to sizing and sequencing the panels. I understand that Moore has much to do with this, that he is obsessive about storyboarding every panel down to the tiniest detail. That may be so, but Gibbons is nonetheless a great choice. Watchmen is a little slow and confusing in the beginning—it's a very big story. But it doesn't take long to see it's in the hands of people who know what they're doing. Not many are better than Moore at exploiting the punctuated rhythms of comic book panels. Rhythms and visual puns are on practically every page, even as they advance the massive plot inexorably. A masterpiece for one and all. Essential.

In case it's not at the library.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986)

It's more important than ever nowadays to keep your Dark Knights straight so here's a way to help you remember. This is the original and this is the best. No other comic book, let alone any movie, touches it. You don't have to think about anything else but this. When you have finished it, go ahead and try some of the others. If you start to feel confused again, return immediately to this one. It's really as simple as that. All those post-'60s-TV-show attempts to salvage Batman from the insipid pop culture mainstream that catapulted him to exactly the wrong renown (such attempts usually signaled by a heavy-handed insistence on the definite article, e.g. "Looks like trouble, we'd better get the Batman") came to naught—as worthy as they were, notably when Neal Adams started illustrating them—until Miller definitively reimagined the strangely enduring figure as a washed-up, middle-aged, has-been alcoholic, suffering the aches and pains of too many late-night fistfights, too many bone-crushing falls of failed acrobatics, and way too much boozing. The Robin in this adventure is a punk-rock chick with various problems. The Joker is a stone-cold psychopath. Superman is a contemptible do-gooder. And our old friend Bruce Wayne is slow, angry, thickened up in the middle, and not always thinking straight. At a stroke, Miller returned the Batman to everything people used to claim he should be. I was skeptical going in, I had heard this before, but this graphic novel is practically guaranteed to change the way people think, and it worked for me. Miller followed this up with Batman: Year One, which reimagined the origin story with equal potency and locked in the modern conception of our favorite superhero with no superpowers. Everybody since then has just been trying to keep up, whether that's Tim Burton or Christopher Nolan in the movies, or the rafts of writers and artists for the comic book and its rejuvenated potential for spinoffs. In this conception, likely best known now from the Nolan movie adaptations, Batman has become more of a psychopath himself, albeit one ostensibly for our side, a loner and vigilante who never recovered from the trauma of seeing his parents killed in a street stick-up, who comes most alive at night attacking prowlers and other bad guys. He's not fun, but he's often impressive, awe-inspiring even, which can get to be just about as good as fun. Miller's story and art (with inks by Klaus Janson, his future partner on the Daredevil franchise for Marvel) are never less than compelling, with their bleak, unified, and nearly perfectly realized vision of a media-saturated Gotham City in decline, and the scary grizzled drunk in cape and cowl who has appointed himself judge and jury of the place after nightfall.

In case it's not at the library.

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993)

I'm really not sure which I like more in Scott McCloud's odd little kickoff to his eventual odd little trilogy (and counting?) of comics meditations: the ideas he lays out so clearly, or what a pleasure the thing is to read. His art style is clean, cartoony, and brims with the energy of his own ideas. Page by page, it's just so much fun to read. And all these years later it's apparent that some of his ideas are slowly but surely becoming the common currency. Example: "what happens between the panels," a concept I last heard directly referenced in the 2010 movie Super (which was pretty good!). Or, "This is not a pipe," which I know started nearly a century ago with Rene Magritte, but still, McCloud really applies the fine point to it. As with most formal arguments for the legitimacy of anything—in this case "comics," a word McCloud explicitly claims for his cause here, with a definition that excludes both Warner Brothers and "New Yorker" cartoons but includes Superman, Little Nemo, and some cave paintings—there's frequently a whiff of the self-consciously defensive about it. For the most part, McCloud skirts around any air of the fanboy, by keeping superheroes in good perspective and by maintaining the generally impressive appearance of someone who really seems to know what he's talking about. So superheroes are here, but so is Tintin, and so are Japanese manga and R. Crumb and all kinds of things. I think I find McCloud most interesting on Japanese comics, because he so obviously knows and appreciates them so much. One problem—and it's all mine, none of it McCloud's—is that as much as I love this I'm not any more inspired than I was before to go plunge into what's out there. Maybe even less so, because I think I know what awaits me. My own taste in comics, I have learned, is not nearly as catholic as McCloud's, nor as passionate. No point, for example, going out and buying a stack of manga. I did that last time (Mai, the Psychic Girl). And found it dull, found myself laboring to read it. In the world of graphic novels that's what I fear more than anything, because there are so many of them now. Yes, I still find things to love. It's just that the ratio of what there is to what's worth it is not so good and seems to be dropping. Again, this is my problem, not McCloud's. McCloud has given us an amazing book here. As far as I'm concerned, he is even better than Will Eisner at this kind of cracker-barrel comic book philosophizing, simply because he tells the stories better. It may be heresy to say this is a greater piece of work than Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art, but there I just said it. I think McCloud truly pried open the jaws of the medium's possibilities here. This one is also better than his own follow-ups too, but there's plenty of room for greatness in this series, as we will see.

In case it's not at the library.

Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1973-1991)

It seems like every time I go through the two little volumes of Maus it finds new ways to surprise me. This most recent time the core story reached me in ways it never has. Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew and father of the author and illustrator, Art, actually spent most of his time during World War II and the run-up surviving one way and another on his own. He was not finally caught and sent to Auschwitz until 1944. Until then he lived by his wits, courage, and a good deal of luck. The realities of his life are all but unimaginable to me now—even to his son who created this, which of course contributes to its complexity and makes it so fascinating. In many ways, Vladek is an awful human being, and Art his ungrateful heir. But in just as many ways they are both admirable—and likeable. The art struck me as surprisingly crude this time, even stick-man simple at points, and generally much more so than I had remembered, but the story is always compelling, and many of the features of the art serve their purposes well. It always works, and some panels are amazing; this time I really noticed the way the Jews (as mice) are shown enduring pain. It's simple, yet haunting, neck tipped back and open mouth a hollow black. This last time through I tried to put myself in Vladek's place. Essentially he spent his 30s, the better part of a full decade, feeling the increasingly dire impact of the German Nazi regime on his life. I suspect I would have been among those who didn't survive—so much of the hiding and running and the humiliations endured seem to me simply intolerable. But you never know, and in many ways that's explicitly Vladek's message to the rest of us, mediated by Art. Vladek's wife (Art's mother), Anja, was weak like me but she made it, even though much of the rest of both her and Vladek's families, including their first son (Art's older brother, whom Art never met), did not. But then she committed suicide in 1968 with no explanation. "No note!" Vladek and Art both can't help but pointing out repeatedly. Aside from its undeniable place as an important milestone of the graphic novel, Maus deserves all its many accolades and its reputation for finding a way to tell a familiar story that makes it uniquely compelling and more powerful than ever. Someone else has no doubt made the point somewhere: this deserves a place among the greatest works of the 20th century, and it certainly deserves to be read, discussed, and taught everywhere.

In case it's not at the library.

Masterpiece Comics (2009)

R. Sikoryak's often pitch-perfect parodies are actually twofold. On the one hand, he is goofing on various classics of world literature: Wuthering Heights, The Scarlet Letter, Crime and Punishment, The Metamorphosis, the Bible's Book of Genesis, Dante's Inferno, Candide. On the other, he is using the classic materials of comic strips and comic books to do so. All indications are that his greatest affinities personally are for the comics—the details he brings so lovingly to his send-ups, not to mention his evident immersion in and absorption of their subtlest distinctions, are often just plain startling, right down to the advertisements that show up as well. Bazooka Joe stands in as Inferno Joe for the Dante, for example, the epic poem reduced to a set of 10 bubblegum strips, complete with merchandising offers (three-headed dog collar, road map of hell, Franciscan rope) and one-line fortunes ("A winged beast will take you for a ride"). Dagwood and Blondie are recast as Adam and Eve ("Blonde Eve"), with Mr. Dithers taking the role of the omnipotent one in a nifty and anatomically correct series of Sunday strips. The novels tend not to fare as well—Wuthering Heights as a trilogy of EC Comics tales is an obvious strategy, but the story stubbornly refuses to collapse well into the format, and as a result is more confusing than anything. That's arguably a problem with the actual EC tales themselves, but still, that's not really a good enough excuse. Batman as Raskolnikov is a bit more effective, and Little Lulu even better and often inspired as Hester Prynne. Modern literature presents its own problems and triumphs as Charlie Brown gets the Kafka treatment ("Good Ol' Gregor Brown") and Superman wantonly and callously puffs cigarettes, taking the role on a series of covers for a comic book called "Action Camus" of the French cipher who shot an Arab for no particular reason. This is dense work, often worth studying closely, a page or even a panel at a time. And it's rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Instead, it's so inventive and ingenious that it's often wonderful just to contemplate the deft and clever ways that Sikoryak brings so many various strands together, like a miraculous juggling act on a tightrope, something to stare at in gap-mouthed awe.

In case it's not at the library.

Fun Home (2006)

Alison Bechdel's thoughtful and complex memoir of her father and growing up in central Pennsylvania in the '60s and '70s, a graphic novel, airs a lot of her family's dirty laundry along the way. But she does so in such a forthright, straightforward, even clinical manner, like someone puzzling over the essentials of her life from the inside of a therapy session after years of working on it, that it comes to seem more clarifying and elucidating than one would ever expect. Her father was a high school English teacher and part-time mortician (the book's title comes from the family's nickname for the funeral home he operated), passionately devoted to literature and even more to projects of historical restoration. He was also, speculates Bechdel, a repressed gay man who lived the great majority of his life in quiet desperation in the small Pennsylvania town where he was born, eventually committing suicide. Whether Bechdel has the authority to make such judgments, as a gay woman out since her college days in the '80s and/or as a close observer of her father and family, is quite deliberately left for the reader to decide. His death, if it was a suicide, is maddeningly ambiguous. This memoir is perfectly wistful in capturing memories and feelings of youth and childhood with which anyone can identify, when Bechdel sets herself to that. What is more fascinating to me is the connection she explores between herself and her father over literature, a connection that is carefully developed and extended across the breadth of this memoir, which saves its most profound revelations for the closing chapter. Even more, the ways she uses her skills as a comic book artist are often surprisingly apt, in retrospect arguably the only way she could tell this story, one that is so deeply embedded in connections to lines of type running across printed pages that a good many panels here are exactly that, reproducing passages from a number of literary heavy hitters—Proust, Camus, Joyce, Colette, and others. For all of its frank and open revelations, Bechdel is careful to seal off the privacy of herself and her surviving family the further away from her father that she gets. I left this with an unsettling feeling of knowing both too much and not enough. I'd like to think she can follow this up with something that deepens the story further. But then I have to wonder how she could possibly do so. It seems to be a story that is finished, after all, loose threads and all.

In case it's not at the library.

Peepshow (1992)

Joe Matt's first and so far still best foray into comic book autobiography (his self-declared career, even raison d'etre, from approximately the age of 24), this collection of a few years' worth of the mundane adventures of his daily life in the late '80s and early '90s opens an intriguing window into his development as an artist. That's not the only window it opens, of course—it's notorious for the ludicrous and occasionally grotesque candor of its revelations, which include shrieking fights with his girlfriend, repulsive habits of thrift and laziness, and, yes, it's all true, the inside view of a porn habit with a few particulars regarding fetish. It is indeed a consummate portrait of ongoing selfish narcissism. He gets away with it (as much as he does) by dint of the comic book art, which is perfectly charming, by the fact that he tends to take ownership of his warts with aplomb and even relish rather than getting defensive or blaming anyone else for them, and because he's just plain likeable. In controlled doses. At a distance. And via the mediation of the printed comic book page. (Everyone who knows him reports that he's exactly as he describes himself, perhaps more so, and it's not like he doesn't catch on—he's often able to convey how others struggle to cope with him.) In the end he's not so different from you or me, just more willing to talk about his stuff and put it out there. What makes this worth visiting and revisiting is the chance to trace the self-discovery as it happens. In the earliest pages you can see him feeling his way toward what he's doing. R. Crumb, Harvey Pekar, and many others by now have made careers of comic book autobiography, but no one does it like Joe Matt, who soon enough flails his way to a discipline he mostly manages to stay within: the single-page/tiny-panel installments he is able to deliver on about a monthly schedule. He explores variations along the way, but never drifts far from what he can do with a single page, a minimum of cross-hatching (it's nearly all line work), and plenty of black ink. And he not only discloses the various personal details of his life and volatile relationship, for which he's famous, but also explores a good many other angles of his life along the way: the philosophy and practicalities of living cheap (some good tips!), his infatuations with showering and collecting and walking, the strange cats with whom he has lived, and all kinds of aspects of his art, including comical abstract exercises. If I didn't know better I'd be tempted to compare him to Montaigne.

In case it's not at the library.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)

Michael Chabon's deft and remarkable novel concocts an alternative history of comic books stretched just wide enough to contain his two titular characters, comic book scripter Sammy Clay and illustrator-with-portfolio-extraordinaire Joe Kavalier, who are cousins. Clay grew up in Brooklyn and Kavalier escaped Prague even as the fascist pall of the late '30s settled across it ("escape" in every sense being the operative word). The novel concerns itself with comic books and a burgeoning new industry and even art form, as well as with World War II, love, destiny, obsession, fate, and finding oneself, among other matters addressed. It sprawls from Manhattan diners where Gil Kane and Stan Lee get breakfast to the wastelands of the Antarctic to the back alleys of the Prague ghetto. It features golems and other super-heroes—even invents one for the occasion, the Escapist, which if not particularly believable as Golden Age fare to me was still good enough for Dark Horse to give it a try recently. There are Nazis here (of course), though mostly of the American variety, along with fisticuffs, spectacular magic tricks, gay sex, and no small amount of casual, historical name-dropping throughout. Orson Welles pops up once or twice. So does Man Ray. But for all the clever sleight of hand and determined wandering afield, Chabon is masterful at keeping the focus on mid-20th century life and all that it brought. And though it's rather a long novel, it lends itself easily to taking in large gulps—which, after the first hundred pages or so, could very well be all you want to do until you've finished it up.

In case it's not at the library.