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Stephen E. Tabachnick
The graphic novel is the most exciting literary and artistic development to emerge in the last 35 years. One way to understand this new medium is to contrast it with previous creations using the comics format in terms of production values and style, the nature of the subjects it treats, its intended audience, and its place in the world of art and literature. Traditional comics began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, beginning with the work of William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, and James Gillray in England, and particularly with the creations of the Swiss Rodolfe Töppfer, who produced comics that we would recognize today as such. His many followers in Europe and America in the nineteenth century include the American R.F. Outcault, who drew The Yellow Kid and Buster Brown, the first comic strips, and who worked for newspaper barons Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, both of whom were interested in appealing to New York City immigrant audiences who did not know English well. There followed more newspaper comic strips, including the fanciful work of Winsor McCay, whose surrealistic Little Nemo in Slumberland remains a classic of the medium, and George Herriman, whose Krazy Kat transformed children’s comics into something more serious by depicting friendly relationships between a dog, a cat, and a mouse. Both McCay and Herriman have been acknowledged as major influences on later comics and even as forerunners of later styles in art, as noted in Judith O’Sullivan’s The Great American Comic Strip: One Hundred Years of Cartoon Art (1990). Then, out of the troubles of the 1930s such as the Depression, came the appearance of the superheroes Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, who were able to confront and overcome these troubles, including the “psychopathic god” Hitler (as poet W.H. Auden put it), at least in the pages of comic books – an invention of Max Gaines in 1933. After the war, an attempt by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham to suppress horror and superhero comics, which were said to be injuring the children and youths reading them, led to the comics industry’s self‐censoring Code, but also to a reaction spurred by William Gaines’s (Max’s son) and Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad Magazine and its satire on American social conventions in the 1950s, which led to the underground comics of the 1960s and 1970s. These new comics, or “commix” as they were often called, challenged all American cultural traditions by showing characters taking drugs, having sex, and openly espousing political views, as described by Dez Skinn in his Comix: The Underground Revolution (2004). Starting around 1978 with the publication of Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories, the graphic novel appeared. The graphic novel, in contrast to the traditional comics, is an extended comic book written by adults for adults which uses the highest production values – including good paper and ink rather than the throwaway pulp that characterized the traditional newspaper comics and comic books – and which is capable of tackling even the most sophisticated and complex social, political, and personal issues. Although it is called the graphic “novel,” this term is also used to describe non‐fiction – including reportage, history, autobiography, and biography – as well as fiction. This old‐new literary and artistic form is now taught in literature departments in universities around the world along with pure prose texts, and in art departments. Each of the very important American graphic novelists who will be discussed here – Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller, Robert Crumb, and Chris Ware – has been influenced by previous comics art but has transcended it in various ways.
Eisner is not the first graphic novelist, but he is the most important one to begin using words and images in serious, extended works. As early as 1941, when he was still creating The Spirit, a newspaper comic strip about a detective, he stated that the comics could become an important literary form, thus predicting the graphic novel. After producing the pioneering Contract with God, he went on to To the Heart of the Storm (1991/2008), and The Plot (2005), to name just a few of his works. In his preface to The Contract with God Trilogy Eisner writes, “In 1978, encouraged by the work of the experimental graphic artists Otto Nückel, Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward, who in the 1930s published serious novels told in art without text, I attempted a major work in similar form […] I called it a ‘graphic novel’” (Eisner 1985: xiii–xiv).
It is interesting that Eisner names these three artists who drew graphic novels without words as his most important influences. They each drew entire novels, including subtle plots, interesting characters, and powerful facial expressions and gestures. The wordless graphic novel appeared during the silent film era and is akin to the silent films. Frans Masereel created the first wordless graphic novel, and went on to create 20 other such works, of which the most famous is Passionate Journey (1919). This tells the tale of a man’s voyage through life, including his joys, pains, and pleasures until he finally becomes a skeleton. Each page constitutes a panel, and the black and white drawings are very expressive, and intensely focus the reader’s attention on each page. Eisner is more detailed and realistic than the modernist Masereel, but he follows Masereel’s black and white style rather than using color, as well as Masereel’s very expressive gestures.
Lynd Ward was an American who also created woodcut novels, particularly his Wild Pilgrimage (1932/1960), which is recognized as his best. An obvious product of the 1930s and the Great Depression, this novel tells the story of a working man who seeks a better life and goes through several adventures, romantic and others, until he is killed in a battle between workers and the police. Ward uses orange as well as black panels to highlight the protagonist’s feelings and thoughts versus his bleak reality. No one, including the protagonist, appears handsome or pretty, and befitting the times, the world as portrayed has very little happiness in it. Although not as bleak as Ward’s world, Eisner’s also highlights the difficulties of the protagonists’ struggles, and like Ward’s his characters look like normal people rather than movie stars.
In A Contract with God (1978), Frimme Hersh, who helped people in his small town in Russia when he was a boy, comes to feel that he has a contract with God that says that if he is a good person, God will always protect him. He even writes the contract on a piece of stone. The people in the town help him get to America because they like him so much, and once in America, Frimme becomes a member of the Hasidic community and keeps all of the laws of Judaism, becoming a respected member of his synagogue. But a child whom he brings up after she was left on his doorstep dies because of an illness, and Frimme feels that the contract has been broken by God. Here we can sympathize with him because he is too innocent to know that nothing in life is guaranteed even if one believes and follows all religious rules. As a result of her death, he feels that he owes God nothing and becomes a successful, if ruthless, secular businessman. He feels some remorse for this ruthlessness and asks the rabbis at his synagogue to draw up a new contract with God for him, but just when he accepts it and vows to live a positive life, he dies of a heart attack. However, a Hasidic boy finds the original stone contract that Frimme had thrown out of the window after the death of his adopted daughter, and vows to live by it. Whether or not he will succeed, we don’t know. Eisner poses the question of whether or not God is watching over us because even the good suffer in this life. Once again, the faces and gestures in this graphic novel are very expressive, which, like his black and white drawing style, Eisner learned from the woodcut novels, including the German Otto Nückel’s Destiny (1930/2007), which tells the tale of a young woman’s tragic life.
As Bob Andelman (2005) explains, because Eisner’s own daughter died at an early age, this story comes from the heart and explains how Eisner himself felt abandoned by God. Most of Eisner’s work is semi‐autobiographical and perhaps that is why it has the feeling of authenticity. In To the Heart of the Storm (1991), he recounts his protagonist Willie’s journey by train to an army base during World War II. His companion is a Turkish convert to Christianity, and they exchange stories about themselves. When they arrive at the base, a storm, shown on a full page, has begun, and this is a symbol for the storm of war that they will soon face. Here Eisner not only employs black coloring between many of the panels; it is also clear that Willie and Mamid are heading toward a dark event.
Posthumously published in 2005, The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a historical reenactment of the writing of an anti‐Semitic tract purporting to show how Jews control the world, is done matter‐of‐factly in that Eisner does not demonize and caricature those associated with writing this forgery for the tsarist secret police. Rather, he portrays those responsible as all too human: opportunistic, politically motivated, and not too moral. Philip Graves, the British journalist who first unmasked this document which was based on a work by French writer Maurice Joly and intended to attack the contemporary leadership of France, is shown to be level‐headed, objective, and intelligent when comparing the original with the forgery. Eisner puts himself into his graphic novel at the end as he shows himself researching this story. He brings it right up to 2003, including the many formal investigations of this pamphlet that have proven it false, while he also reveals its continuing publication by those who continue to want to use it for their own ends. Eisner’s creation of pages employing few panels, or panels without firm borders, allowing the panels to fade into one another, like the often grayish coloring in this work, constantly gives the reader a feeling of the ambiguity involved in allowing falsehood to slide into truth.
A teacher by nature, Eisner went beyond drawing and writing comics into showing others how to do the same. In his Comics and Sequential Art (1985), he reveals many of his own techniques, including how to portray many possible gestures and postures, and illustrates them with an adaptation of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. In this case, Hamlet is “played” by a gang leader in the Bronx, who meditates on life while standing on a tenement rooftop. His facial expressions, his postures, and his gestures tell the story as well as the words do.
A major prize in the comics world, the Eisner Awards, is named for him because of his pioneering approach to the comics and a career that continued until his death in 2005. Eisner surpasses his wordless models in that he bases his work on actual historical events, such as immigration to New York in the early twentieth century, World War II, and anti‐Semitism from tsarist Russian days to our own, and manages to create equally or more powerful representations of these events than his predecessors create with their completely fictional stories.
Like The Contract with God Trilogy, Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1991) is an American classic, which in 1992 won a Pulitzer Prize, the first graphic novel to do so (as Duncan and Smith [2009] point out), and excerpts from which are now included in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, the first time that this distinguished university teaching tool has included the work of a graphic novelist. The reasons for these distinctions are many: the book’s intense focus on the Holocaust, the sensitivity with which Spiegelman depicts his parents’ travails during that time and his own travails as the son of survivors, his commentary on the creation of the book itself, which is interwoven with his story, and the techniques he chose to use, including animals to represent groups of people, genuine photographs, and even the placement of the bar code on the back of volume 2 over his father Vladek’s striped concentration camp uniform. Spiegelman’s work points up the fact that, as noted earlier, the graphic “novel” also covers non‐fiction, including autobiography and biography. Some of the best graphic novels, including Maus, are non‐fictional works such as Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde (2000), which is reportage about the Bosnian war, Miriam Katin’s We Are on Our Own (2006), her memoir of her and her mother’s survival of the Holocaust, and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1994), an outstanding textbook.
In Metamaus, Spiegelman’s recapitulation of his artistic journey from the conception of Maus to its creation, he states that his “most central influence was Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad,” that George Herriman’s Krazy Kat “shaped my artistic aspirations,” and that Winsor McCay’s page construction was “very important to my development” (Spiegelman 2011: 189, 190, 193). He also gives high marks to Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, and Bernard Kriegstein’s Master Race as well as to Will Eisner, whose popular detective comic The Spirit “had been an influence on me from the time I was fourteen or fifteen” (Spiegelman 2011: 197). Here we have a virtual catalogue of early and mid‐twentieth‐century comics classics and a hint of the underground of the later 1950s and 1960s in his mention of Mad, which began in 1952. From each of these early comics masters, Spiegelman learned not only about content, but also about techniques, including page layout, inventive captions, the use of special images to represent variations in vocabulary, and the possibility of multiple interpretations.
Mad is the most important of these comics for Spiegelman because it is more than a traditional comic devoted to superheroes and children. As Maria Reidelbach explains (1991: 33), because it was called a magazine it evaded the Comics Code, which demanded censorship of all comics directed toward children and even teenagers. Mad made fun of everything from advertisements to the Joseph McCarthy hearings. Although humorous, it heralded the use of comics for serious non‐fictional subjects that was to become very important for the graphic novel form. Spiegelman states that the magazine was very innovative in technique, and that “One story was just about the sound effects in comic books, told through sound effects” (Spiegelman 2011: 189). With its undaunted humor and tackling of complex topics, Mad became the father of the underground comics, including stars like Robert Crumb.
Spiegelman, however, goes beyond all of these influences in Maus’s deep seriousness, sensitivity, complexity, and technical force. As has been demonstrated (Tabachnick 1993), this graphic novel unites the bildungsroman, or youth novel; the epic; and the kunstlerroman, or novel about the development of an artist. The epic layer recounts the struggle of Spiegelman’s mother Anya and his father Vladek to stay alive in a Poland ruled by the Nazis and then in Nazi concentration camps. In the bildungsroman layer, we see Art attempting to deal with his father’s demand that he eat everything set before him on the table, his father’s miserliness which even causes him to return a half‐opened cereal box to a supermarket for a refund, and his father’s destruction of his mother’s diaries, which Art wanted to use to help write Maus. But worse than this is his mother’s suicide, which leaves him with a permanent feeling of guilt, and causes him to go to a psychiatrist who is a Holocaust survivor like his parents. Art’s wife Françoise, a French woman who converted to Judaism to please Art’s father and who is a cartoonist in her own right, must cope with both Art’s and his father’s anxieties. This is very heavy stuff, going far beyond the content of newspaper comics or anything in previous comic books or even in graphic novels.
In the midst of this difficult material, the Holocaust testimony of his father, like Art’s mother’s suicide, stands out. Vladek details the beatings, tortures and cremations that he experienced, witnessed, or heard of in the concentration camps, as well as his attempt to aid Anya who was held in a nearby camp. After the camps are liberated, Vladek and Anya are miraculously reunited, go to Sweden, and then finally to the United States, where they live in New York City. But it is not surprising that Vladek and Anya can never recover from their experience. This is an epic tale of survival, in which Vladek, although no longer religious as he was as a young man, seems to have been aided by God at least three times: when he had a dream about the date of his release from a German prisoner‐of‐war camp and it turned out to be true; when a priest who knew Jewish laws and customs was in his barrack at Auschwitz, and predicted that he would survive; and when a Gypsy fortune‐teller told Anya after the war that Vladek was alive and that they would find each other, as they do, and that she would have a child who would replace the one who was killed during the Holocaust. The possible presence of God is the only positive side of this horrifying personal history (Tabachnick 2014).
In the kunstlerroman, or artist’s development layer of the story, Spiegelman recounts his difficulties when writing and drawing it. He shows himself betraying his father’s desire that he not recount certain incidents such as his father’s affair with a girlfriend; he speaks to his wife Françoise about whether he should portray her as a French frog or a Jewish mouse; because his father denied that there was an orchestra at Auschwitz that played while men were being forced to march to work, he shows an orchestra playing at Auschwitz but it is almost covered up by a group of prisoners; he shows himself at his drawing table surrounded by corpses and how he shrinks to the size of a crying child when interviewed by reporters. All of these scenes give insight into the tortures of the artist and the difficult decisions that he had to make when producing this work.
In addition to this unusual content and structure, Maus employs techniques that are new to the comics: he surprises the reader with two photos of his parents to lend authenticity to the story; he gives us a cascade of drawn photographs; he uses mice to represent the Jews, cats to represent the Nazis, dogs to represent the Americans, reindeer to represent the Swedes, frogs for the French, and a Gypsy moth for a Gypsy; he puts “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” recounting his mother’s suicide, showing real people instead of animals, into the middle of his volume; he uses diagrams to show the crematoria and Vladek and Anya’s hiding places; and he places the bar code on volume 2 over Vladek’s striped uniform to unite the past and the present.
In all of these ways, Spiegelman surpasses his influences in seriousness, emotion, and technique. In his turn, he has influenced numerous graphic novelists, including the Iranian‐French Marjane Satrapi, the creator of the superb Persepolis (2000/2007), which recounts her difficult experiences living under the Shah of Iran and the Khomeini regime. Maus may well be the supreme comic of all time; at the minimum, it is a classic graphic novel.
Frank Miller is one of five American artists, including Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb, and Chris Ware, who have helped bring the graphic novel into prominence as a genuine literary and artistic form worthy of intellectual respect. He is known not only for Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and other revisionist Batman works, but also for Sin City, a series of graphic novels about a corrupt city. Miller has taken Batman and raised him to a new level. Batman has gone through several incarnations starting with his invention in 1939 by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. The original Batman is emotionally darker – and his chosen identification with bats strengthens that impression – than many other comics characters, because he witnessed his parents being killed by a mugger. As Roger Sabin puts it, “At first he was a gothic figure: a tortured soul, driven by revenge and most at home in the shadows” (1996: 61), and Arie Kaplan points out that the creation of the character was influenced by Bela Lugosi’s portrayal of Dracula (2008: 52). After this there came a period when Batman fought aliens and then, in the 1960s, took part in a tongue‐in‐cheek television show. Miller’s reenvisioning makes him both more emotionally complex and a more realistic character than ever before.
In 1986, Miller published – through DC Comics – Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. In his introduction to this volume, the important British Watchmen creator Alan Moore praises Miller for having given the Batman character credibility even to those who do not like superheroes, and for having brought Batman into our contemporary world, in which Gotham City, populated by street gangs, is much worse than it was in previous portrayals. Moreover, Batman is older than he used to be, and at the age of 60 his exertion causes him physical pain that he did not experience when younger. We also get to see the retired Commissioner Gordon, who was supportive of Batman, in a more personal way than ever before when, for instance, he complains about his wife’s “hippie vegetarian recipes” (Miller 1986: 2.3). On the many television screens that fill this graphic novel’s panels, we hear commentators espousing theories that Batman is a “social disease” (Miller 1986: 2.10) who causes the young to become criminals through their opposition to him; and the new Police Commissioner Ellen Yindel has issued a warrant for his arrest. On the larger stage, a caricatured but recognizable President Reagan has engaged in battle with the Russians over an island called Corto Maltese (undoubtedly a play on the name of Italian comics creator Hugo Pratt’s adventurer Corto Maltese) that may result in a nuclear war. Superman, under the command of the president, is there to help prevent the world from descending into chaos. Miller varies panel shapes and sizes, from a full page without borders showing Superman about to throw a Russian tank to small panels opposite that page containing TV screens. While Miller’s Batman, Superman, and the evil Joker look their parts, their faces are realistic enough to resemble those of normal people; and the real sci‐fi author Harlan Ellison is mentioned, and both Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, as well as Reagan, appear. While Superman heads off a nuclear war by diverting a missile, he is working for Reagan’s government which calls Batman an out‐of‐control vigilante, and fights with Batman. But at the end, Batman – with Superman’s covert knowledge and approval – is left alive in a secret hiding place and continues his plans to rid Gotham City of crime.
Miller has stated that his two biggest influences were Will Eisner and Johnny Craig – known for his EC Comics Crime SuspenStories, but he also pays tribute to Jack Kirby, a major force in the traditional comics. He has also been influenced by crime writers, including Mickey Spillaine, Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Edgar Allan Poe, whose “Purloined Letter” is mentioned in the story itself, as Alex Pappademas has noted (2014). What he has done is to create a hero whose neurosis and the effects of older age are taking their toll, in contrast to earlier Batmen. And another dark message of Miller’s Batman stories is that crime will always be with us, just like war.
In Sin City, Miller takes us into a crime‐ridden Basin City in which even the Church is corrupt. While Miller’s portrayal of horrific and sadistic crimes is (hopefully) fantasy material, his view of politicians and corrupt authorities is not. The title of volume 1, The Hard Goodbye (2010), is obviously based on Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, but Miller’s protagonist Marv cannot be said to have anything in common with Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe. Marv is hulking, brutal, and sadistic. He enjoys inflicting pain on criminals and doesn’t mind killing priests as well as hitmen. He is able to bounce back after being hit by an auto, and is so ugly that he cannot achieve a relationship with a woman. Yet we like him precisely because he does have a moral compass in a thoroughly corrupt environment, and because he becomes something of a Petrarchan lover when he does form a relationship with a prostitute, however brief.
Because of a one‐night stand with the prostitute Goldie who is then murdered, Marv decides to find her killer at any price, as a tribute to his caring for her. After many adventures, he finds that Cardinal Rourke is responsible for supporting the murderer Kevin, who eats the bodies of the whores whom he has murdered. The cardinal finds that secretly indulging in cannibalism allows him to arrive at the same spirituality that he has seen in Kevin. Marv manages to kill both men only to find himself in the electric chair because of his murder of the cardinal. Yet Marv is the only truly moral person in the story. He smiles at his death in part because Goldie’s twin sister, Wendy, also a prostitute, understands Marv’s sacrifice for her sister and comforts him at the end.
Once again, as in The Dark Knight, Miller achieves a breakthrough visually and in characterization. In contrast to The Dark Knight, which uses a striking mix of colors, The Hard Goodbye is in black and white and yet achieves many different effects. (In other volumes in this seven‐volume series, Miller sometimes puts in a dash of color in one or two panels indicating lipstick or clothing, making those panels all the more striking.) For instance, when Marv walks in the rain, the pictures become abstract, with white lines on a black background depicting the rain and Marv himself. His face is split into both black and white, as if to show both the moral and the sadistic sides of his personality. Sometimes it is difficult to see his body through the rain. All of this gives an impression of the difficulty of his standing against Cardinal Rourke, whose towering statue appears against the rain, as well as an idea of Marv’s thoughts as he struggles to make sense of Goldie’s murder. On the back cover of The Hard Goodbye, the giant word “Blam!” is repeated three times and the letters of this word contain partial views of Marv’s shooting a priest in dark pictures against a white background. Once again, this is Miller’s own technique, not seen in previous comics, and a tribute to his artistic ability. Miller has moved beyond his influences, and has arrived at his own style, which in its excitement exceeds all earlier models; and with co‐director Robert Rodriguez, he has managed what may be the best film adaptation of any graphic novel to date.
Robert Crumb, perhaps the most famous underground graphic novelist, has been above ground for several decades and was initially inspired by Carl Barks’s Disney characters such as Scrooge McDuck, and by Walt Kelly’s L’il Abner. He and his brother Charles drew comics for a pastime when they were children and teenagers. But the biggest influence on him – as on Spiegelman – was Harvey Kurtzman, the creator of Mad. Crumb was going to work as an associate editor at Kurtzman’s post‐Mad magazine Help!, but it folded before he could take up his job, as he has stated in an interview with Andrew Arnold (Arnold 2005). It was obviously Mad’s attack on all traditional American values that inspired Crumb to begin his own attack on socially accepted platitudes, and his frequent use of animal characters to do so obviously owes much to his early cartoon influences. He has also stated that he likes Spiegelman’s Maus, in which, as we have seen, animals represent people (Groth 2004: 87).
But there is a great difference between the animal characters that Crumb liked when he was young and his own characters. His Fritz the Cat tells the story of Fritz, who has become a major star and interacts with many characters, all of whom (like him) are animals, including an alligator, a rabbit, and a goose. Crumb’s animals display none of the innocence of the Disney characters and are alternately bored, lascivious, and cunning. One of Crumb’s trademarks is explicit if neurotic sexuality, and that is what we have here. All goes well for Fritz with a stuck‐up alligator girl and a groupie female rabbit who admires him as a celebrity and with whom he ends up having sex. But Andrea the goose, a former girlfriend, is disappointed in Fritz’s lack of sexual attention to her, and ends up stabbing him as he walks away from her apartment laughing at her. In the last panel, which shows Fritz lying on the ground in his own blood with an ice pick in his head, the final words in the story are “The End!” Crumb decided to kill off Fritz because he disliked the film Fritz the Cat made by Ralph Bakshi (1972), but while doing so Crumb emphasizes the envy and even madness that underlies human sexuality and relationships, as well as the finality of death. Moreover, he mocks the criticism of the media for showing too much violence when his final word bubble, with an arrow pointing at the dead Fritz, reads “Violence in the media.” For Crumb, sex and violence is the true human reality, and the media, including his graphic novels, are simply reporting the truth.
Crumb mocks more than criticism of the media in “A Word to You Feminist Women” when he depicts himself in this work claiming that he is “all for women’s lib” but gradually moves to a position insisting that he can say whatever he wishes about women or anything else, and ends up cursing women for trying to silence him. In “Salty Dog Sam Goes Surfing” he mocks a black man, Sam, who attempts to sell a stolen TV because he wants a surfboard, and then holds a knife on a man who wants to give him his surfboard for free because the ocean is polluted. Sam concludes, in Crumb’s rendition of African American dialect, that “us niggers gits it aftuh nobody else wants it” (Crumb 1992: 111). Needless to say, in these works Crumb is deliberately breaking all politically correct barriers and does not mind how he does so. His black and white drawing style, featuring distorted faces and exaggerated body parts, particularly sexual ones, fits his obvious goal of stating the forbidden and again mocking the human race for its basic proclivity toward violence and hypocrisy.
Because he breaks all polite barriers and is ready to satirize groups as well as individuals, his second wife Aline, also a graphic novelist, had him move to France with their young daughter Sophie because, as she says in Terry Zwigoff’s superb documentary Crumb (1995), she was afraid someone would actually kill him; and given the fact that many people did not understand that eighteenth‐century writer Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” was a satire, and that Swift was not really advocating eating children, she was perhaps not far wrong. But in his French retreat over the past decade, Crumb has experienced a new and surprising phase in his development. One of his most recent creations is an adaptation of the biblical Book of Genesis. Unexpectedly, the book is respectful and very true to the original. Crumb’s usual black and white drawing style, as well as his very expressive faces and substantial, well‐endowed if not very pretty women, is very much in evidence. He also shows the sexuality that is present in that biblical book, but not licentiously. God looks authoritative but is not exaggerated. In short, Crumb has shown what he can do when he wants to go straight rather than display his own neuroticism through his strange characters, including the Snoid, who lives in a girl’s behind. Like the original, Crumb’s Book of Genesis (2009) is a very striking piece of work, and is perhaps the best graphical biblical adaptation among the many that exist.
Another display of Crumb’s positive side as well as his artistic ability is found in The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb, published in 2006, after he had moved to France. These are largely portraits and landscapes drawn in both the United States and France, and they reveal remarkable talent. The portraits, all detailed and emotionally meaningful, are largely of musicians whose music Crumb likes, particularly jazz and blues singers and instrumentalists Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jack Teagarden, Kansas Joe, and Memphis Minnie. But he concludes the work with “Failure in Sudan,” showing two distressed children (victims of the Sudanese civil war), which he copied from the cover of the Economist magazine. Just before that, we see Aline in 2004, and Crumb himself in 2005, both looking old and perhaps a bit distressed. This contrasts with his sweet pictures of his children and family members when they were young. As we also see in his willingness to adapt the Bible, Crumb seems to be coming to terms with mortality, and his drawings of “1920s types” of people here reveal a deep sympathy for suffering humanity. In this collection, Crumb no longer mocks people for their small (and large) insanities as he does in his earlier work, but rather seems to understand that we are all in this thing called life together and will suffer the same end. It is a remarkable journey that only a great artist could have portrayed over the course of his career. He has said that his work is “just plain weird […] you know, Icky, Yucky …” (Crumb 2006: introduction), but in this volume, his work is anything but that.
Chris Ware (Franklin Christenson Ware), born in 1967, has stated in an interview with Tavi Gavinson (2012) that he was influenced by Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman and his magazine Raw, and Harvey Pekar, author of American Splendor, an important autobiographical graphic novel series showing Pekar’s mundane life as a clerk in a VA hospital, his bout with cancer, and his ever‐present neuroticism. And in an interview with Stuart Kelly in the British newspaper the Guardian, Ware stated that Charles Schulz’s Peanuts showed him that it was possible for a writer to be sympathetic to his own created character, and that the Belgian graphic novelist Hergé showed him how clear a drawing style could be. He also mentions the importance of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), which he first read in high school. But he has gone beyond all of these influences to create his own distinctive style of writing and drawing.
He is best known for Jimmie Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), which has a unique drawing and panel style that complements its melancholy attitude. Essentially, it tells the story of an inconsequential middle‐aged man who has never met his father, until one day he visits him. They have little to say to each other, but he also meets his half‐sister, a black girl whom his father adopted, with whom he speaks more. Then his father dies because of a car accident, and Jimmy feels guilty because his father was driving a car rented when his own car was stolen during a meal at a diner with Jimmy. Jimmy feels that his father’s unfamiliarity with the rental car may have caused the accident. When his father dies, his half‐sister seems to blame him, too. We also see his great‐grandfather and his grandfather and the difficult relationship between them. Jimmy’s mother, with whom he is constantly in touch, is dominating. His sad demeanor prevents him from ever having a girlfriend. So, this is a story of loneliness and lack of family support, and it is based on Ware’s own life, since he was also out of touch with his father.
The protagonist is made to look sad always, and he does not seem to be “the smartest kid on earth.” He works in an office, has no particular interests or hobbies, and is not educated. Moreover, he is not physically attractive and his face does not display any intelligent qualities. However, we learn that he is smart emotionally because of what he has been through given the absence of his father, and what he learns when he finally meets his father. There is literally not a happy incident in this book, except perhaps when a girl looks at him and he thinks she smiled at him. However, at the end there is some hope in that a new office worker seems to be friendly, although she too makes him sad by speaking about spending Thanksgiving with her family and how it is hard not to do so. Perhaps she represents another false hope for him with regard to women; judging from his past experiences, this is likely to be the case.
To tell his story, Ware always employs rectangular panels, but on almost every page he varies their sizes, so that, for example, very small 1 “x 1” panels are placed next to longer but still small panels as well as a much larger panel. We seem to go into Jimmy’s head and yet remain outside of it. The colors are muted even when they are bright. No buildings except those in the Great Exposition shown in the story are particularly beautiful or outstanding, and when it snows the bleakness is palpable. Ware begins and concludes with a set of notes and diagrams in very small print, which is difficult to read. The techniques, like the story itself, seem to involve the reader in an understanding that not much in this life really is understandable and that emotion seems to govern all. If one is lucky enough to experience positive emotions because of one’s family or good fortune, so be it, but Jimmy unfortunately has neither of these supports. At the end of the book, the reader has great sympathy for Jimmy.
Before he created Jimmy Corrigan, Ware was known for the Acme Novelty Library books, and the Acme Novelty Date Book contains assorted features created from 1986 to 1995. These range from sketches of naked women and raunchy comic strips replete with curse words to landscapes and the strange faces of humans and cartoon characters. Very few of his people are particularly handsome or beautiful, and the strips always seem to revolve around some kind of unpleasantness or neurosis. Often the expressions on people’s faces are sad or even agonized. But Ware’s drawing talent is never in doubt. Whether he is drawing a cartoon, a comic strip, or a portrait of a real person, there is depth or verve, and always originality. We also see pictures of artists agonizing over their drawings; never are they completely happy with what they are doing. Ware has obviously worked a lot of his own psyche into many of these drawings, just as he did with Jimmy Corrigan. He seems to share a lot of Crumb’s tendency toward neurosis, if of an entirely different kind than Crumb’s. In any case, we are very far from the traditional comics. Even though some of his creations are humorous, it is difficult to read Ware and to be either entertained or amused because something deeper always seems to lie below the surface.
But most recently Ware has pioneered a new form of the book itself. Unimpressed with the digital book, Ware set out to show what the material book can do that the digital book cannot. The result was Building Stories (2012), a title that covers both the idea that this is a work about an apartment building and several people, including one unnamed woman, who live in it, and the idea that the reader must build his or her own story after perusing it. The work – which as a whole cannot quite be called a “book” – contains many different elements, including a board much like a playing board, with a picture of the apartment building on it; a newspaper with panels; the equivalent of a children’s book as well as a larger book, both consisting of comics panels; two paneled pamphlets; and several comic strips. All of these items relate stories of people who live in the apartment building, and, depending on the order in which the reader reads them, there are many different stories, as Stuart Kelly (2013) has noted.
This construction, as it were, is the first time that a story has been told in this manner. There are other graphic novels that are original in terms of structure, such as English artist Tom Phillips’s A Humument (1970), involving a Victorian novel, W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document (1892). Phillips paints over each page of Mallock’s novel, leaving only a few words exposed. The reader gets a new novel based on the old, which is completely transformed. However, Phillips uses one book to create his new work. For Ware, on the other hand, books are only a small part of his work. If the reader begins with the playing board, he or she sees the apartment building and some of its denizens doing different things, including making love. Then, if one randomly moves to the book entitled September 23rd, 2000, the building itself speaks to itself about its growing old and about its tenants. One tenant is a woman, an amputee who has difficulty with relationships until at the end she finds someone and has a child with him, while feeling nostalgic about the old building when she drives by; she has obviously moved out of it and started a new life. But in a second book, possibly but not definitely entitled I Just Want to Fall Asleep and Never Wake Up Again, she has a boyfriend who gets her pregnant and she has an abortion. This story in the I Just Want to Fall Asleep volume seems to occur before the story in the September 23rd, 2000 book because no living child is mentioned in I Just Want to Fall Asleep, but the order in which the reader reads these books is entirely his or her own choice, and the feeling the reader experiences is different depending on that order.
As Peter Sattler (2010) notes, Ware is particularly good at creating memory. In both September 23rd, 2000 and I Just Want to Fall Asleep and Never Wake Up Again, the protagonist is either looking back at her old apartment building or her abortion. Ware himself has said that, at least for him, “Comics is about memory,” which, as Brad Prager has pointed out (Ball and Kuhlman 2010: 108–109), aligns him with authors like James Joyce, whose Ulysses (1922) contains Molly Bloom’s memories, among others. Sattler goes on to state that “‘Building Stories’ wants us to feel our own sense of selfhood, to remember the experience of remembering, as we encounter it both on its pages and in our interactions with those pages” (Sattler 2010: 319). Daniel Worden states that Ware continually contrasts turn‐of‐the‐century Chicago with present‐day Chicago, another means of creating memory (Ball and Kuhlman 2010: 109). In other words, Ware continually forces us to experience this juxtaposition of past and present in order to evoke in us the very feeling of what it is to remember, and this fits with his general attitude of melancholy.
Each of the graphic novelists we have looked at – Eisner, Spiegelman, Miller, Crumb, and Ware – has his own distinctive style and attitude, just as the best authors of prose texts or painters do. They have taken the outstanding techniques from the traditional comics, including the work of McCay and Herriman, and underground comics creators such as Harvey Kurtzman, and they have brought a depth and meaning to their work that rises above that of even these superb predecessors. They have been able to extend themselves, to speak their hearts, and to reveal themselves both verbally and visually in striking and complex ways. We not only read their thoughts and feelings in word bubbles or narrative asides, but also see those thoughts and feelings at the same time, and we do all of this in a reading experience that allows us to look forward and backward in their books at will. The graphic novel has transformed the comics into a powerful new medium that will permanently enhance American literature and art.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 23 (JEWISH AMERICAN LITERARY FORMS).