Post by Administrator on Nov 5, 2005 21:14:33 GMT -5
By MARTIN LEVIN
When I was a child, all my friends collected comic books: Donald Duck, Little Lulu, Batman, Roy Rogers, Tarzan, Vault of Horror, even Archie. Grownups had no doubt they were fodder for us alone. Questionable fodder, at that. A censorious psychiatrist named Frederick Wertham wrote an influential book, The Seduction of the Innocent, in which he demonized comic books as the cause of everything from mental retardation to cultural apocalypse. Strange, though, how a generation weaned on comics is so reluctant to give up the form, instead relishing, into our thirties, forties and beyond, its increasing complexity and sophistication.
The difficulty until recently has been getting mainstream attention for comics -- or comix, as many now call them. Originally, the word referred to independent, underground, sometimes scandalous comics such as those of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, but now it's also a means of distinguishing them from older, simpler sources of childhood pleasures.
Crumb and his co-freaks were artistic outlaws, the vanguard of a satiric samizdat. Not respectable. But a trio of New Yorkers began a revolution in how comics are perceived. Art Spiegelman's Maus was an inspired, profoundly moving account of the Holocaust and its aftermath, particularly its effect on the relationship between the artist and his father. Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl books created a stunningly evocative alternative New York as seen through the darkly naive eyes of a lonely real-estate photographer.
The third member of the troika was the late Will Eisner (1917-2005), who may plausibly be regarded as the father of the graphic novel. Eisner is probably best known as creator of the comic-book superhero The Spirit, but his more lasting legacy should be The Contract with God trilogy. First appearing in 1978, it is a highly detailed account of growing up in a tenement during the Depression, as Eisner did. And, as in all the best graphic novels, the marriage of word and image is central to the effect. It is no small claim to say, as The Economist did, that his work is worthy of comparison with that of Bernard Malamud or Isaac Singer, or as I do, that the trilogy can stand with a great novel that mines a similar vein, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep. Lucky us! For the original three volumes --The Contract with God, Life Force, Life on Dropsie Avenue -- are being reissued by Norton in a single volume, The Contract with God: Life on Dropsie Avenue, late this month: a great Christmas present, an even better one for Chanukah.
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The gate once open, a horde of barbarians streamed through. In fact, entire publishing houses are devoted to the form. In the United States, Fantagraphics, which produces both alternative comics and collections of old mainstream strips such as Krazy Kat and Peanuts, was a pioneer. Canada has the highly regarded Drawn & Quarterly of Montreal, which has published innovative comix and developed their creators -- Seth (whose Wimbledon Green is reviewed today), Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, Ho Che Anderson and David Collier among them. D&Q also produces some superb international figures such as the innovative Chris Ware and cartoonist cum war correspondent Joe Sacco.
But mainstream publishers have also caught on, particularly Pantheon, which published Marjane Satrapi's potent Persopolis series, which caught the predicament of a secular Iranian girl after the Khomeini Revolution. It also publishes the harsh-tender works of Daniel Clowes (Ghost World, Ice Haven), David B.'s opus, Epileptic, and has just issued a hardcover version of Charles Burns's astonishing 12-comic-book tale, Black Hole (unpaginated but plenty big, $34.95).
Burns, who began his career with Spiegelman's avant-garde comics magazine RAW, has mastered various comic-book tropes -- teenage love, vulnerable wise-ass kids, EC Comics-style horror, the underground comics obsession with sex and drugs -- and shapes them to his own subversive ends. His dark, highly contrasted art is a perfect foil for this story of teen angst. A plague has broken out among randy high-schoolers in Washington State in the 1970s. Spread by sexual contact -- shades of AIDS! -- it takes unpredictable forms. Some of its sufferers become physically grotesque and seek collective refuge in the woods. Others develop stigmata: One grows a tail, another a mouth in his neck, another pulls mystical scrolls from holes in her feet. And it's incurable.
Burns gives us a trio of protagonists: Keith Pearson, Chris Rhodes and Eliza. The prosaic nature of their names is belied by the horrific nature of their adultless predicament, and shunts back and forth in time, space and narrative consciousness, not to mention fantasy and what passes for reality, as well as sexual affiliation. This tense, atmospheric, sometimes hallucinatory work is one of the best evocations of the terrors of teenhood I've ever seen, further proof, if such were needed, of the novelistic capacities of the graphic form.
When I was a child, all my friends collected comic books: Donald Duck, Little Lulu, Batman, Roy Rogers, Tarzan, Vault of Horror, even Archie. Grownups had no doubt they were fodder for us alone. Questionable fodder, at that. A censorious psychiatrist named Frederick Wertham wrote an influential book, The Seduction of the Innocent, in which he demonized comic books as the cause of everything from mental retardation to cultural apocalypse. Strange, though, how a generation weaned on comics is so reluctant to give up the form, instead relishing, into our thirties, forties and beyond, its increasing complexity and sophistication.
The difficulty until recently has been getting mainstream attention for comics -- or comix, as many now call them. Originally, the word referred to independent, underground, sometimes scandalous comics such as those of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, but now it's also a means of distinguishing them from older, simpler sources of childhood pleasures.
Crumb and his co-freaks were artistic outlaws, the vanguard of a satiric samizdat. Not respectable. But a trio of New Yorkers began a revolution in how comics are perceived. Art Spiegelman's Maus was an inspired, profoundly moving account of the Holocaust and its aftermath, particularly its effect on the relationship between the artist and his father. Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl books created a stunningly evocative alternative New York as seen through the darkly naive eyes of a lonely real-estate photographer.
The third member of the troika was the late Will Eisner (1917-2005), who may plausibly be regarded as the father of the graphic novel. Eisner is probably best known as creator of the comic-book superhero The Spirit, but his more lasting legacy should be The Contract with God trilogy. First appearing in 1978, it is a highly detailed account of growing up in a tenement during the Depression, as Eisner did. And, as in all the best graphic novels, the marriage of word and image is central to the effect. It is no small claim to say, as The Economist did, that his work is worthy of comparison with that of Bernard Malamud or Isaac Singer, or as I do, that the trilogy can stand with a great novel that mines a similar vein, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep. Lucky us! For the original three volumes --The Contract with God, Life Force, Life on Dropsie Avenue -- are being reissued by Norton in a single volume, The Contract with God: Life on Dropsie Avenue, late this month: a great Christmas present, an even better one for Chanukah.
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click here
The gate once open, a horde of barbarians streamed through. In fact, entire publishing houses are devoted to the form. In the United States, Fantagraphics, which produces both alternative comics and collections of old mainstream strips such as Krazy Kat and Peanuts, was a pioneer. Canada has the highly regarded Drawn & Quarterly of Montreal, which has published innovative comix and developed their creators -- Seth (whose Wimbledon Green is reviewed today), Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, Ho Che Anderson and David Collier among them. D&Q also produces some superb international figures such as the innovative Chris Ware and cartoonist cum war correspondent Joe Sacco.
But mainstream publishers have also caught on, particularly Pantheon, which published Marjane Satrapi's potent Persopolis series, which caught the predicament of a secular Iranian girl after the Khomeini Revolution. It also publishes the harsh-tender works of Daniel Clowes (Ghost World, Ice Haven), David B.'s opus, Epileptic, and has just issued a hardcover version of Charles Burns's astonishing 12-comic-book tale, Black Hole (unpaginated but plenty big, $34.95).
Burns, who began his career with Spiegelman's avant-garde comics magazine RAW, has mastered various comic-book tropes -- teenage love, vulnerable wise-ass kids, EC Comics-style horror, the underground comics obsession with sex and drugs -- and shapes them to his own subversive ends. His dark, highly contrasted art is a perfect foil for this story of teen angst. A plague has broken out among randy high-schoolers in Washington State in the 1970s. Spread by sexual contact -- shades of AIDS! -- it takes unpredictable forms. Some of its sufferers become physically grotesque and seek collective refuge in the woods. Others develop stigmata: One grows a tail, another a mouth in his neck, another pulls mystical scrolls from holes in her feet. And it's incurable.
Burns gives us a trio of protagonists: Keith Pearson, Chris Rhodes and Eliza. The prosaic nature of their names is belied by the horrific nature of their adultless predicament, and shunts back and forth in time, space and narrative consciousness, not to mention fantasy and what passes for reality, as well as sexual affiliation. This tense, atmospheric, sometimes hallucinatory work is one of the best evocations of the terrors of teenhood I've ever seen, further proof, if such were needed, of the novelistic capacities of the graphic form.