the book club: New books dissected over e-mail.

The Year's Best Comic Books

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from: Ruben Bolling

Getting Oedipal

Posted Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2000, at 11:42 AM ET

Ted, you ignorant slut.

Now we can really roll up our sleeves. Without lingering unduly on Clowes' work (I'm sure we've got epic battles to be fought tomorrow over Chris Ware's work), I do take issue with some of your thoughts on David Boring.

You feel that Clowes could have said what he needed to say on the few themes of the book without resorting to the pretense of a story--he could have said his piece with gag or editorial cartoons. In the Super-Fun-Pak Comix installments of my comic strip, I often play with this notion with the mock daily comic strip, "Comix Classix," in which I take classics of literature and Cliff-Note them down to a three-panel gag. But my joke is that while you can distill novels down to a Beetle Bailey joke (The Grapes of Wrath--Tom: "Hey that's not fair!"; Policeman, bonking Tom on the head: "Life's not fair!") I think most people would agree something is lost in the translation.

You can't really believe that Clowes would have done better by writing and drawing in exposition form his thoughts on children of divorce, sexual obsession, and alienation. The story format allows him to explore these and other themes with complexity, nuance, and ambiguity, and that grants the work far more power.

What did you think of the way messages seemed to appear to David through his reading of disjointed panels from the comic book his father wrote before leaving the family? Doesn't that technique achieve a poignancy and profundity that would be sorely lacking if instead Clowes flatly stated, "Children whose fathers abandoned them miss paternal advice and connection"?

For example, you state that the central issue of the book is the interrelationships between adult children of divorced and non-divorced parents, and I did not read it that way. I think you brought your own history and belief systems to the book and got that out of it, while my own experiences led me to a different reading. Creating a story that lends itself to multiple interpretations is not "dicking around"; it's the whole premise of the narrative art form!

Well, at least when this is all over, we can say that we agreed on Latino USA. There was a lot to be learned, and it was generally done in an entertaining way. Alcaraz (with whom I've never "cold chilled," so I've got nothing to disclose) does a great job, and his drawings do their welcome job of creating and enhancing humor within a pretty scholarly work. His style is deceptively simple, as evidenced by the fact that he switches between cartoony character drawings and his excellent comic-style portrait work without breaking stride.

I didn't mind the typeset passages; I think they were all done to set off quotations. At times it seemed the text-to-illustration ratio was getting too high, but it's tough to fault Stavans for ambitiously trying to be as comprehensive as possible.

Our final selection is Jimmy Corrigan, or The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware.

I've followed Ware's work since the first issue of his series of comic books, "Acme Novelty Library," was released, a comic book I bought solely on the basis of the cool look of the cover (something I'd never done before and haven't done since), and I instantly became a tremendous fan and admirer of his work. Which leads me to my own disclosure: I probably only agreed to do this "Book Club" exchange so that I could get an advance copy of this collection of "Jimmy Corrigan" stories that originally appeared in the "Acme Novelty Library" series. Rereading the installments that I had read in comic-book form, all at once and in one impressive volume, I'm convinced that this is a Goddamn Masterpiece of American Art.

Jimmy Corrigan is a pathetic loner who, despite the fact that he is 36 years old, fantasizes that he is The Smartest Kid on Earth. The story follows Jimmy's journey to meet his father, who had (you guessed it) abandoned his family when he was an infant. But the book is far more than that: It's an intergenerational epic spanning back to Jimmy's great-grandfather, and dealing with issues of not only family but race, abuse, loneliness, and God.

Ware's technique of storytelling and use of the comic form are never less than astounding. Any given panel can unpredictably depict either Jimmy's reality, his fantasies, his thoughts, his or his family's history, or any combination of the above. The effect is dizzying, but Ware masterfully never allows it to obscure the narrative flow and consistently uses it in brilliant service to the story.

For example, when Jimmy first meets his father in an airport bar, his first thought, graphically depicted, is of his father having sex with his mother in a bedroom, followed by a sequence in which Jimmy calmly sits down on the bed next to his naked father while his mother sleeps and proceeds to use the bar glass in his hand to slice up his father, all while exchanging the awkward pleasantries of formal strangers.

Yeah, it gets pretty Oedipal.

Jimmy Corrigan is a graphic novel that fulfills the promise of the form; it is not an illustrated novel, it is a story told pictorially in the unique language of the comic book. Every single comics convention is innovatively used as a storytelling element--from the placement of word balloons to the lettering to the varying drawing styles. Even crucial plot revelations are disclosed graphically and without any words.

Well, I'm running out of effusive ways to say effusive things about this book. It was unbelievably well crafted, and very, very moving. Luckily, I'm not required to do it justice by explaining it more fully--this is a one-day e-mail exchange, not a full review (as I carefully hedged yesterday).

But I really look forward to your comments on this, Ted. I remember enthusing about Ware to you a couple of years ago while showing you his comics, and, while I don't want to put words in your mouth, I don't think you ever warmed to his work. I wonder if this tome has changed your mind?

Your respectful comics antagonist,
Ruben

the book club
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from: Ruben Bolling

Getting Oedipal

Posted Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2000, at 11:42 AM ET

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The Beauty Supply District, by Ben Katchor and David Boring, by Daniel Clowes

Ruben Bolling creates the weekly comic strip “Tom the Dancing Bug,” which is distributed to 70 publications, including the Village Voice, the Washington Post, and Salon.com. Ted Rall's cartoons appear in the Village Voice, the New York Times, and more than 100 other publications. This week, they discuss four new comics books: Ben Katchor's The Beauty Supply District (click here to buy it); Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (click here to buy it); Daniel Clowes' David Boring (click here to buy it); and Ilan Stavans' Latino USA: A Cartoon History (click here to buy it).

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Reader Comments from The Fray:

If I may add the obvious to the two gentlemen's discussion of the work of Ben Katchor: the guy loves cities, especially New York. Sweetly and without irony--thank God. Even if you don't have the pleasure to hear him state that flat out in one of his charming lectures, it's obvious from his strips, which are all about the semi-hidden pleasures of cities past and present, the type of odd niches that can exist only when there is a large and cosmopolitan population. In many cases, the context of his work, the detailed street backgrounds, are the main subject. So if you don't like cities, like perhaps Mr Rall, Julius Knipl probably won't work for you.

--George Grella

(To reply, click here.)

[And there was more enthusiasm for Katchor: Michael Lewyn agreed with Mr Grella, saying "When I read Mr Katchor and then I realize that I don't live in NYC, I want to start crying." And Adam Morrow thought he "brings to life all of the wonderful historical details that one ignores in daily life--the fact that each stranger you pass on the street has a fascinating story to tell (as does every fire escape and curbstone), and that this is a story you will never get to hear. Katchor gives his readers a glimpse of what those stories might be."]

I was the staff editorial cartoonist for City Pages, the alternative weekly in Minneapolis, for ten years. I looked at the possibility of syndicating my stuff to the alternative weeklies around the country. But I gave up on the idea because I soon discovered that the editors of those papers were basically so left-brained, so verbal, as to qualify as right-hemisphere-retards. They were utterly visually illiterate, had no appreciation for anything except words words words. Unfortunately for those of us artists who are politically far left of center, the most verbal, least visually intelligent editors in the country seem to be those who are most politically to the left. I think this malady has spread to many of the editors of mainstream dailies, as well, many of whom can't see the value in any kind of cartoon that isn't almost entirely word-based. In a true cartoon, the words and images interact in such a way that neither the words or images by themselves deliver the message of the cartoon. In a true cartoon, you have to look at the picture and read the words for it to even make any sense at all. In Rall's "cartoons", like those of Tom Tomorrow, Groening, Lynda Barry, et al, the images are unnecessary. This is why the Left in America will never pose any real threat to the status quo: their visual stupidity puts them out of touch with the masses.

--Wag

(To reply, click here.)

[Note from the Fray Editor: This Book Club brought a lot of very knowledgeable comics fans into The Fray, showing varying levels of enthusiasm. Reuben Nisenfield said "it's like Griffin and Sabine by Kevin Smith". Many were concerned to distinguish between comic books and comic strips collected into a book. There was this spirited defense of Chris Ware's work from Walter Biggins, and praise for Daniel Clowes too.

In general, Ted Rall proved to be a--how best to put this?--thought-provoking critic with the Fray-going public, perhaps even controversial. Try this ("sloppy vendetta journalism") or this ("one of the strangest critics I have ever read") or this ("A more interesting topic might be: Why are Ted Rall's cartoons so frequently based on demonstrably false premises?") And here, Danny Hellman says Rall sued him for making a joke about him--we suggest you read it before posting anything too rude about Mr Rall.]

(9/2)