Three Graphic Novels

I'm not much of a graphic novel person. I had a brief comic book phase as a child, but it was short-lived. I liked to read Calvin and Hobbes. Most of the graphic novels I've read have been ones given to me by friends, who were sure I would like them, and some of the time they were right. Tomorrow I'm taking a seminar with Roz Chast, the erstwhile cartoonist of the New Yorker, whose cartoons manage to be funny and light-hearted, I think, without being airless, or like so many of the other cartoons in that magazine, insufferable. It's strange to think of what Chast does as being similar to a graphic novelist, even though the basics--picture and text, text and picture--are there. They sent me three graphic novels to read in advance of the seminar: Derf Backderf's My Friend Dahmer, Keiler Roberts' My Begging Chart, and Adrian Tomine's Killing and Dying.

Brent reviewed My Friend Dahmer here. As he noted, there's a limitation to the insight Backderf can provide about Jeffrey Dahmer, who was less Backderf's high school friend than a kind of mascot. But it's not as if Backderf's book can be reduced to an odd party anecdote--no really, I went to high school with Jeff Dahmer--and in fact, it's Dahmer's strange relationship with Backderf and his friends that makes the memoir interesting. I recognized something regrettable in it myself, remembering the way we once "adopted" kids with strange mannerisms or tics, without really befriending them. I remember well the way these kids performed their tics, as Dahmer performs a cruel imitation of his own unwell mother, but then, of course they did. The nature of the relationship prevents Backderf from having any real insight into Dahmer, but the stark black-and-white artwork, cribbing on the outlandish styles of R. Crumb and other underground artists, fills in some of the gaps. Over and over again, Dahmer is alone on the page, isolated from the other figures--or placed at the head of some forking path that represents, as Backderf describes it, the moment at which he becomes irredeemable.

My Begging Chart is a memoir, too, of a kind: a series of vignettes of Roberts' life as a mother and wife, who happens (as I understand it) to live with MS. Most of these vignettes have a formless quality to them that emphasizes their essential mundanity; they capture the everyday fuck-ups of a not-perfect mother, but also moments of small joy shared with Roberts' daughter. Who has some Park Slope name like Xivia or Zenon. I can't quite remember right now and the book is in the other room. The art has hasty, unshaded sketchbook quality that underlines the quotidian nature of the vignettes. It may actually be that the book is a kind of sketchbook, recording moments as they happen. But its lightness, I thought, made it the most forgettable of the three.

The best by far, I thought, was Adrian Tomine's Killing and Dying, a grim, funny collection of short stories. Tomine's style seemed, to my not-very-expert eye, cribbed from the Sunday funnies. See how each beat in the opening story, "Hortisculpture," is opened with a title banner like a newspaper comic. "Hortisculpture" tells the story of an earnest gardener who invents a new art form, a kind of concrete tube in which plants grow. Though the hortisculptures seem at least half-inspired, a lack of interest (who wants to buy a living sculpture you have to pay the gardener to maintain?) breeds a bitterness and resentment in him that threatens to destroy his family. "Am I talented?" he begs his wife, who responds that she has no idea--but she can't keep talking about it anymore. It's a touching, bittersweet story about the ways in which imaginative power is limited, and grows stale.

The best of the stories in Tomine's collection is the title piece, about a family--with a similarly rotund, balding father figure, drawn up in a slightly less cartoonish style than the one in "Hortisculpture"--whose daughter decides she wants to get into stand-up comedy. The limits on the daughter are even more profound than the hortisculpturist: she really isn't funny. Mom and Dad bicker about whether to support her by paying for classes, or being honest with her. And all the while Mom is dying of cancer, something that Tomine never mentions but makes clear by the character's wasting appearance--and then sudden absence from the frame. (One all-white panel says everything.) Dad, bereft and at sea, sneaks into an open mic night his daughter has refused to let him attend, and listens as she bombs horribly. 

How can you follow your dreams when you have no talent? And how do your protect your kids from the terror of being ordinary?These questions are at the heart of "Killing and Dying," which made me think there's something I'm missing out on by not reading graphic novels. And you know, they only take a couple of hours to get through. Who knows how high my yearly total could climb...