American Splendor: Another Day

If I haven't said it before here on Village Grouchy, I'm a huge fan of Harvey Pekar's work. To be brutally honest, it was watching the film version of American Splendor that really got me into reading and thinking about comics seriously (though, of course, I had read Maus, Watchmen, and Understanding Comics a long time ago).

Pekar's latest collection, Another Day (collected from four 2006 DC issues) shows Pekar up to his usual antics: reminiscing, observing, plunging the toilet. We get regular appearances, too, from his wife Joyce Brabner and adopted daughter Danielle. Just as comforting, perhaps, are the regular appearances of some of Pekar's familiar stable of artists, especially the team of Greg Budgett and Gary Dumm and old hands Josh Neufeld and Dean Haspiel. Missing, however, are some other old favorites: Gerry Shamray, Val Mayerik, and (of course) Crumb. It is interesting, of course, to see Gilbert Hernandez draw Pekar, and Eddie Campbell, as well. One wonders if the success of the Pekar film has allowed him to expand the range of his artists.

Occasionally, in Another Day, the artists' styles come very close to either parody or a style that intentionally partakes of the "humor comics" mode (I'm thinking of Hunt Emerson's art in "Through the Generations" and "Uncapped"; also Bob Fingerman's "World Cup," where the first image of Pekar makes him look like a gnarled little leprechaun). Now, I haven't read every back issue of Pekar's comic, but this seems new to me. Not unwelcome, I think, but new (to me at least), and it gives a different feel to these stories, the first of which is actually structured to set up a kind of visual punch line in the final panel: "autobiographical" it may well be, but Pekar clearly recognizes that this story doesn't really work by being autobiographical: Pekar's personality is not at the center of the story. In the end it makes me think of other moments in Pekar's work where he steps out of the autobiographical mode entirely, such as his odd parody of/homage to Maus (I can dig up the reference, if readers out there want it).

More on Pekar and his artists to come from me in the future, I think.

The Escapists

The description on the back of the dust jacket of this short graphic novel (published by Dark Horse in 2007) describes it as "An awesome heroic adventure, a heartbreaking coming-of-age tale," et cetera. Perhaps that should have been enough to keep me from buying it, but I'm a big fan of Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and so I didn't resist.

I'm tempted to merely summarize the plot, which goes something like this: geeky nerd buys rights to the character "The Escapist" (and, it seems, all the other related characters: Luna Moth, The Saboteur, and so on, although those details are not really addressed), gets his pals to draw and letter what he writes, gets into various jams trying to promote and publish the book, and eventually sells out and begins writing his own comics series. Given Brian K Vaughan's success in writing comics like Y: The Last Man, I'd hoped, frankly, for a more interesting story.

At a couple of places, the overlap between the nerdy teenagers' lives and the comic they produce is interestingly handled--though mostly it's a matter putting their dialogue into the word balloons of their characters. This serves, of course, to emphasize a kind of identification between character and reader/author that plays out in other ways in the book--which, perhaps unintentionally, reinforces comics as a kind of simplistic escapist fantasy. At the same time, the "new Escapist" comics that these kids produce is utterly boring to me (as I've said before, I'm just not much interested in superheroes: it may be related to why I hate evil). As such, however, it was hard to take seriously the idea that these kids had a new perspective to bring to the Escapist, or to any comics, which made it less successful as "an earnest defense of dreamers everywhere" (back cover text, again) for me, at least.

Still, there are a few worthwhile moments, not least of which is the setting in Cleveland, which is Vaughan's hometown, and some of the local details are used well. It's always nice to see the Terminal Tower in comics. And Chabon's Introduction is good: possibly the best part of the book.

Jeff Smith's Bone

I recently finished the monumental one-volume collection of Jeff Smith's Bone comics, weighing in at about 1300 pages, I think. Since the Bone books are being republished (in color) by Scholastic, it seems clear that they have found a market in the YA niche, and the incipient romance between the main character Fone Bone and the beautiful (and explicitly adolescent) young Thorn (all in the context of a lengthy high-fantasy plot) seems to support the audience that implies.

But one of the most striking features of Bone lies in Smith's drawing style, which treats most of the human characters in a relatively realistic mode (though one often characterized by caricature or exaggeration), while the three Bone characters are drawn with a highly stylized, simplified line. (Smith acknowledges the influence of Walt Kelly on his work; the Bone characters could almost fit right in to a Pogo strip.) The juxtaposition is somewhat disquieting, and even Thorn comments at one point that Fone Bone never wears clothing at all. Further, the Bone characters are of indeterminate age: Smiley Bone smokes cigars; Phoney Bone was a scam artist who had run for mayor of Boneville and now tends bar in Barrelhaven, and so on. The implication is that the Bone characters are adult, at least when they're at home in Boneville, making Fone Bone's transparently adolescent crush on Thorn seem especially odd. It's hard not to read Fone Bone as ambiguously depicted, adult in some ways, adolescent in others.

The Bone books first started appearing in 1991, before Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, so it's unlikely that Bone was influenced by McCloud's theories, but it's hard not to suspect that, as McCloud would argue, the simplified drawing style used for the Bone characters is intended to promote reader identification. In short, the mode of drawing Fone Bone in particular as "iconic" rather than "realistic" seems linked to the anticipation of a young-adult reader--but there's something very weird about how that works given his sometime depiction as an adult, and as his clearly-adult cousins are drawn the same way.

But it's an entertaining book, nevertheless, especially since Smith lives and works in central Ohio, and Old Man's Cave from the Hocking Hills makes an appearance in the landscape of the novel, which is a bit of a treat for readers who know that place.