Joshua Malbin

It’s approximately the last third of Kevin Baker’s Luna Park that interests me, since it’s there that the graphic novel stages an experiment with narrative form that I haven’t seen before.

Up to about the hundred-page mark Luna Park is a competently written crime novel with beautiful drawings by Danijel Zezelj. Alik Strelnikov is a low-level Russian mob enforcer in Coney Island who shoots heroin with his girlfriend Marina so he won’t have to remember the death of a previous lover, Mariam, during his Army days in Chechnya.  A rival to his boss owns Marina and is planning to wipe out his competition, including Alik. In Alik’s mind this confrontation repeats the one that killed Mariam, and he is determined this time to save Marina.

So far, pretty conventional. But what I didn’t notice until rereading was how Zezelj sets us up all through even this conventional portion of the story. He separates elements by color: almost everything in Coney Island is a shade of blue-gray, the flashbacks to Chechnya are in reddish brown, and other stories of the past are in pale yellow with brick-red figures. These stories include Genghis Khan’s invasion of Russia, the legend of a queen who killed hundreds of suitors, and a story Alik’s grandfather once told about fighting Americans during the Russian civil war of 1919.

These color schemes make it very easy for the reader to track where a panel belongs, flashback or current narrative. In and of itself, that’s a pretty common comic book device.  What’s uncommon is what happens after the betrayal and bloodbath Alik has been awaiting and fearing: as they flee, Marina leads him into a funhouse near the boardwalk. Alik steps behind a curtain—and we are in a world of yellows.  Without needing to be told we know we are in the past, and it soon becomes clear that Alik is now living out his grandfather’s story, only he is one of the American soldiers, a naturalized Russian. It is the same tale once again, this time with a woman named Mariya, the same desperate attempt at rescue and the same betrayal. We can gather all this visually, without exposition to explain it, and that’s a very neat trick. We only get exposition almost at the end, when Marina/Mariya shows Alik echoes of the same story over and over through Russian history: betrayals and violence.

Unfortunately Kevin Baker provides one last twist and next puts Alik in the shoes of Lee Harvey Oswald on the day before the Kennedy assassination. That’s a deeply silly decision. Maybe he thought a resolution about Russian history wouldn’t resonate with Americans. And, to be honest, that version of the resolution doesn’t ultimately hang together either, though it’s better than an Oswald ending. I am nevertheless impressed at the original method of turning from realism to something else. It’s rare to see the art in a comic do that much narrative work, and I certainly can’t think of another example where it does work of quite this kind.

Preview here.

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