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Thursday, September 2, 2010
Rich's Reviews
The Quitter
by Harvey Pekar & Dean Haspiel
DC/Vertigo, $19.95
The critically-acclaimed author of the long-running series American Splendor tells of his childhood and young adulthood, in which his constant struggle for acceptance took him from one aborted activity to another, never satisfied with his results and always fearful of failure. I bought an AS collection days after seeing the movie, and while I was pleased to see that the movie was extremely faithful to the book while having a freshness and life of its own, there’s something about Harvey Pekar’s perspective of “everyday life” that I don’t always find appealing. Mostly, I enjoy his stories, but there’s a certain dryness to his prose style at times, almost as if he’s being too direct. I’m not talking about the veracity of his yarns; every biographer embellishes the truth in some way, even if they say otherwise. I mean that there’s something to be said for storytelling as well as story. Sometimes I’ll read a Pekar tale and not understand what he saw in it that made it worth telling and then I’ll wonder how the same tale would read if told differently. Joe Sacco employs a utilitarian approach in his non-fictional work, but his prose has a way of drawing me in and seeing the things he sees that Pekar’s sometimes doesn’t. And then there’s Will Eisner, whose writing was on a much more emotional level, but then he dramatized his stories to a greater degree than Pekar. In his intro to To the Heart of the Storm, for example, he admitted that it’s a blend of fact and fiction, and that he drew upon selective memories.
I suspect Pekar doesn’t believe in that style of writing. I respect him for wanting to be true to what he sees around him, and for not being afraid to depict life’s mundanity as well as its, um, splendor, because when he’s on, he can be very engaging and fun to read. Part of the reason why may have its roots in the contemporary Jewish tradition. There is something in the great Jewish writers and storytellers and comics of the early-to-mid-20th century – Jack Benny, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Will Eisner, Joe Kubert – a distinctiveness born of the culture they sprung from, that gives their work such a ring of authenticity, and Pekar has it as well. But the difference with Pekar is that he doesn’t embroider his work to the same degree that others do. He doesn’t play up either the humor or the drama in his stories; he just lays everything out on the table and lets the reader be the judge of what’s funny and what’s serious. That can make for good reading as well, but sometimes it makes you scratch your head and go, “Huh. Okay. Next.”
The Quitter falls into the former category. Pekar talks of the generational and cultural gap he shared with his parents, Polish immigrants who, according to him, didn’t realize that the old ways of living could not be applied in America, a land with a different social structure. In trying to assimilate into this new culture, Pekar constantly runs up against his own fears and insecurities about not being able to make a mark for himself, and he presents this conflict with a hefty degree of self-depreciation and fatalism. His narrative is so vivid, in fact, that the bits of dialogue he sprinkles in are mostly superfluous, which, I’ll admit, irked me a bit. I know he can do dialogue, but I think that sometimes Pekar relies too much on narrative, which goes back to my original point about how Pekar is less interested in storytelling techniques than in getting across what he wants to say. By no means is this a bad thing; obviously it’s served him well for over 30 years. It’s just my personal bias.
Speaking as someone who has been an admirer of his work since I first saw it in Bob Fingerman’s Minimum Wage as a back-up story, I’m quite pleased to see Dean Haspiel get a high-profile assignment like this. (Indeed, I was amused to see him billed in the solicitation for The Quitter as “Rising star Dean Haspiel” as if he just came onto the scene with this book!) His thick, zesty ink lines and kinetic poses are reminiscent of Mike Allred and early Kyle Baker. Here he uses a looser style, with more shadows and even some dry brush work to indicate folds and wrinkles on clothes. I like the shadows but not the dry brush stuff; it makes his art look rougher than it should. Anyone who’s seen the AS movie knows that Pekar does rough stick-figure layouts that he passes on to his artists, so I’m not sure who to credit for the recurring motif of Pekar split down the middle, whether figuratively by the background, or literally by the space between panels or by shadows, whenever he’s in conflict over something. Regardless, it’s an effective one that helps to further underscore his anxious state.
The Quitter makes for a perfect introduction to Pekar’s work. Coming as it does in the twilight of his career adds a certain level of poignancy to it, I think, and this is reflected right from the start. The book has a rather odd beginning: we see present-day Pekar about to walk off into the white void of the page, when suddenly he turns around, thinks for a moment, and then begins telling his tale. Now I seriously doubt there’s any intentional symbolism in this, but one could interpret the white of the page (sans borders) as the onset of death that Pekar resignedly heads towards. What makes him stop and decide to begin this narrative? He realizes that he still has at least one more story to tell that has not been told. The book’s final panel zooms in on present-day Pekar’s world-weary face as the darkness descends behind him, worrying about his future. I don’t believe this to be anything more than artistic license on Haspiel’s part; when I spoke to Pekar at SPX he seemed hale and hearty and I doubt he’s in danger of dying just yet. It’s only something I thought of as I’m writing this now. I expect Pekar has quite a few more stories left to tell. B+
Cinema Panopticum
by Thomas Ott
Fantagraphics, $18.95
A girl at a carnival views astonishing tales through a set of mysterious nickelodeons: a traveler who checks in at a strange hotel, a wrestler who must grapple with Death itself, an optometrist with an unorthodox method to relieve nearsightedness, and a bum who receives an apocalyptic vision. I love scratch board work! When I was in high school I experimented with it in my printmaking class one semester and found it to be quite a challenge. Basically you scratch out highlights with a blade on an illustration board treated with black ink. Very tricky, but the effect is eerie looking. This graphic novel didn’t get much in the way of fanfare, which is a shame because it’s quite good. Thomas Ott does a great job of rendering light and shadow with the scratch board, which was probably the trickiest thing to learn for me. You have to go against your instincts as an artist and think in reverse when you work in this medium. To me it felt like sculpture; you’re carving out an image with the blade and you have to be very conscious of everything you do because mistakes are tough to cover up. And with the level of detail that Ott puts into this book, I’d bet that he had a great deal of pre-planning before he first set blade to board (tight layouts, for example). The stories themselves are wordless vignettes, with the girl at the carnival as the framing device, and they’re appropriately creepy and weird (especially the optometrist one). I’d especially recommend this book for fans of old-school EC horror. Cinema Panopticum kinda flew under the radar, but I think it’s one of the best things I’ve read all year. It probably won’t inspire a wave of scratch board books – this is a difficult medium to master – but it’s wonderful to see it applied to comics in such a skillful manner. A
Fell #1
by Warren Ellis & Ben Templesmith
Image, $1.99
New detective in town – a town with all the charm of a mausoleum – gets acclimated with the place and its denizens as he looks into an unusual death. Warren Ellis appears to be channeling David Lynch and David Fincher here, but otherwise it’s more of the bitterness and cynicism that we’ve come to expect from him. Fell himself is a somewhat interesting character; he leans more towards cynical than bitter, and his gift for reading people at a glance is clever, though I hope it doesn’t become his shtick. The way he uncovers the lead in this case is a bit too convenient, but I can accept it if it means we get an actual done-in-one story for a change and not part 1 of 15 or whatever. Ben Templesmith’s art provides the appropriate Seven look, muted colors and all (I’m surprised it wasn’t raining), though I wasn’t sold on the figures. A bit disproportionate in places. For a mere two bucks, Fell is certainly a worthy bargain, though I’m not sold on it yet. I’d like this to be more than just another world-weary cop in beaten-down city story. B
Ida’s Kiss: The Adventures of Joe Jamebong
by Mac McCool
Kameleo Comics, no price listed
James Bond-like spy goes on the trail of a killer virus. This tries to go for Austin Powers-type humor but doesn’t go far enough. It feels like it should be a spy parody but it doesn’t do more than ape the stereotypical Bond conventions. The art, however, is the saving grace. Great cartoony figures are mixed with beautiful renderings of European locales. The writing needs to push the humor much further, preferably away from the Austin Powers/Our Man Flint territory and into someplace different. B-
Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards
by Jim Ottaviani & Big Time Attic
GT Labs, $22.95
The story of dueling 19th-century paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, as they attempt to uncover dinosaur fossils in the American West and discredit each other’s work in the process. This is essentially about two egos who both have something to prove, to themselves and the scientific community of the late 1800’s, and it’s amusing and at times a little sad to watch them try to out-maneuver each other in their quest to get their work taken seriously. Jim Ottaviani is known for his love of science history which he incorporates in his work, but I don’t think people realize how good a storyteller he is as well. Beyond weaving the threads of history together into a cohesive narrative, he excels at making these historical figures into three-dimensional characters, with behavioral quirks, speech patterns, and humor that’s an outgrowth of their personas. Plus, he’s very careful to not spell out every last detail in his writing, which he could easily do given the kinds of stories he tells. Big Time Attic is the studio consisting of Shad Petosky, Kevin Cannon and Replacement God creator Zander Cannon. Their art veers back and forth between cartoony and semi-realistic, but they do a solid job of capturing the look of the time period, clothing, architecture and all. After exploring the complicated realm of quantum physics in Suspended in Language, it’s nice to see Ottaviani return with something more accessible, and Bone Sharps has all the elements that make his work enjoyable. B+
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
