Also audio thru chapter 39 is now up on the Soap and Water page.

http://joshuamalbin.com/soap-and-water/

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The last book of Guy Delisle’s I reviewed was about his time in Burma, and when I wrote about it I had mixed feelings about his customary form, which is to string together four- to eight-page travel vignettes almost exclusively focused on his day-to-day experiences, using what he sees or hears as an opening to discuss some broader phenomenon about the culture he’s visiting. His stance is always that of a sincerely interested, naive tourist rather than a journalist, and I felt that it simultaneously  showed too much humility (in that he declined to speak for Burma) and not enough (in that he also gave space to things like his problems with air conditioning).

On the whole, though, I liked Burma Chronicles. I just wanted even more about the country. It was a closed, mysterious society and I was curious.

I came to his new book Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City with exactly the opposite predisposition. Few countries on earth receive as much consistent media attention as Israel, and its history and conflicts have already been the subject of countless books, including graphic works by some of my favorite (Joe Sacco) and least favorite (Sarah Glidden) comic book authors. I had no curiosity left about it.

As it turns out, that makes it the perfect subject for Delisle’s interested tourist routine, in part because he is a keen observer of details it turned out I had never seen before. Rather than dramatize big injustices, like Sacco, or grapple with the whole arc of modern Israeli history, like Glidden, he focuses on small ironies and oddities.

When he visits Hebron, for example, he does discuss the ongoing conflict between settlers and Palestinian residents, but does so by remarking that there are certain streets Palestinians cannot use, and that the one they can use that runs next to settlers’ homes has been roofed with netting to catch the garbage settlers try to throw down from their windows. He visits a settlement near where he’s living in East Jerusalem and notes that many Arab Christians are living there, attracted by the cheap rent. “It’s like we’re resettling the settlements!” laughs his host.

Overall, then, he presents a picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of its effect on daily life, both in Israel and in the West Bank, which turns out to be fascinating and darkly funny. (He is never able to get permission to visit Gaza, and he guesses that the Israeli official who denies that permission does so because he thinks Delisle is Sacco.)

Three elements stuck out for me in particular.

First, his year in Israel overlapped with Operation Cast Lead, and he does an incredible job of describing the surreality of going about his daily routine while a war takes place just a short drive away. One striking sequence has him and a friend at the beach, watching fighter jets go past en route to Gaza.

Second, the wall encircling Palestinians in the West Bank. He talks about it only occasionally, but is always trying to sketch it, and it shows up constantly in his descriptions of other events. It hangs over everything else silently, just as he must have experienced it.

Third, Delisle is fair-minded, and makes a point to present what he sees as the best aspects of Israeli society. Specifically he points out that the Israelis can be more critical of their government or of Israeli extremists than any American media outlet would ever dare to be.

On December 4, settlers occupying a building in central Hebron were evacuated by the Israeli army. The settlers put up a fierce fight, and six soldiers were injured during the operation. Other settlers responded with violent attacks on Arab families, all under the eyes of journalists. The story made the front page of the papers. The vast majority of Israelis vigorously disapprove of the extreme behavior of the Hebron settlers. In a statement following these incidents, Ehud Olmert spoke of “pogroms” perpetrated by Jews against Arabs. Harsh words, deliberately used by the prime minister to make an impression.

…

Elsewhere you might think twice before accusing Jews of carrying out pogroms… In Israel, it’s not an issue.

Delisle is interested in Israel in all its diversity. He visits the Samaritans, the Armenian Church, a Bedouin village, the Dome of the Rock. He tours an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. He even goes on a propaganda bus tour organized by a pro-settler group. In the end it is clear where his sympathies lie, and above all who he sees as villains. But the personal travelogue format allows him to be fair about all he does experience without having to throw in a lot of caveats about all he doesn’t, and I felt like he showed me a great many new things about a subject I’d thought I was sick of.

PDF preview here.

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I know it’s cliche to think things like, “Can you believe people still love the Odyssey after 2700 years,” it’s a bit like becoming enraptured with your hand when you’re stoned. Nevertheless, it is marvelous to contemplate the structure and evolution of the human hand after smoking pot (I have heard), and it is remarkable that the Odyssey remains a great read in 2012.

That awe leads many writers to want to borrow prestige from timeless works—itself a time-honored tradition upheld by James Joyce and the Coen brothers, among many others. Gerry Duggan and Phil Noto join the tradition with The Infinite Horizon, a graphic Odyssey set in a near-future dystopia where undefined wars have left the world in anarchy. Our Odysseus (unnamed) starts his journey home from Syria, where the U.S. is pulling out of its final war; his Penelope, actually named Penelope, is home with their son “Terry” in upstate New York, trying to hold their farm against waves of refugees from the city. (Oddly they’re in the Catskills and not Ithaca. Maybe Ithaca would have been too on the nose.) Odysseus slowly makes his way home, fighting past a pirate attack, the Cyclops, the Lotus Eaters, the Sirens, and I think Scylla and Charybdis.

All of this is good adventure sci-fi, and the art is several notches above average. It’s also fun to play the game of identifying which episode of the Odyssey we’re on now.

But there’s a cost to borrowing prestige from a classic like the Odyssey: it raises the reader’s expectations. When you borrow perhaps the greatest adventure story in world literature, readers will expect a great adventure as a matter of course—plus something more. After all, I could always read the Odyssey; I need an additional reason to read this new version of it. What does this version tell me about my world that the original doesn’t? Or, another option: what does this version tell me about the Odyssey that I might otherwise miss?

In other words, why are you retelling the Odyssey?

Actually, that’s a question you could ask of any work that draws on or refers to sources it wants the reader or viewer to recognize. For example, O Brother, Where Art Thou? answers well and A Serious Man doesn’t, and that accounts for about 80 percent of why the former is a better movie.

As good as The Infinite Horizon is at spinning a yarn, its answer is essentially nonexistent. As a result it’s emptier at the end than I wanted as I was reading it. That’s too bad, because the idea of using the Odyssey as a template to write about a returning American soldier is a timely one, given the struggles of our real-life returning soldiers, and I would have liked to see something more meaningful done with it.

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I know I regularly inveigh against the proliferation of memoirs, but I’m going to praise a memoir today. In fact, I’m even going to say I hope budding memoirists follow Derf Backderf’s example. If we must have all these memoirs, we might as well have ones that know their place.

In My Friend Dahmer Backderf keeps himself squarely in the background. He’s telling the story of his high-school years, yes, but he knows that the only reason readers might care about those years is that he went to high school with Jeffrey Dahmer. He keeps his focus on Dahmer, therefore, even following him into solo scenes, reconstructing his habits and home life from later interviews Dahmer gave. He himself—Backderf—only appears when his life intersects Dahmer’s.

This may seem like a simple thing, but imagine how easy it would have been for a memoirist to do it the other way around, to stick to his own perspective and only describe the moments of Dahmer’s life that touched on his. Not just easy, common. I’d wager that 90 percent of memoirists would have gone that way, and their decision might be defended as a form of journalistic integrity, but really it would come across as narcissism and a lack of imagination. What Backderf has done instead is much more respectful of the reader, and much more compelling.

Partly that’s because even in high school, Jeffrey Dahmer was fascinatingly fucked up. His parents were in the midst of a bitter divorce, his mother suffered from some kind of paranoid delusional thing and was heavily medicated, and he’d already started the serial killer pattern of hacking up roadkill to see what was inside. In school he mimicked the tics and slurred speech of a person with cerebral palsy, and his weird behavior made him a sort of mascot for Backderf and his friends. To keep a lid on his necrophiliac urges he kept himself permanently drunk, including at school, and Backderf asks how all the adults in his life could have ignored his obviously nutty behavior and failed to get him psychiatric attention.

I think that’s probably an unfair question. I’m perfectly willing to let Backderf and his friends off the hook when he points out that:

You never ‘narced’ on a classmate. It simply wasn’t done. Besides, my friends and I, we were just clueless small-town kids wrapped up in our own lives.

I think he should let the adults off the hook a bit too. They should have noticed and tried to do something about Dahmer’s alcoholism, sure, but I can’t believe that getting him attention for that would have been very likely to uncover his deeper problems. Maybe it would have. In any case, Backderf certainly makes it easy to understand how people can ignore and rationalize weird behavior—and frankly much of the time, the 90 percent of the time you’re not dealing with someone dangerous, that might be the right way to react.

But in asking “Where were the adults?” Backderf is at least following through on the best thing about My Friend Dahmer: he treats Jeffrey Dahmer as a human being. Which doesn’t mean he excuses him, of course. Treating him like a human being means treating him as a being at least theoretically capable of moral judgment. He writes in the preface:

This is a tragic tale… It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent. Once Dahmer kills however … my sympathy for him ends. He could have turned himself in after that first murder. He could have put a gun to his head. Instead he, and he alone, chose to become a serial killer and spread misery to countless people.

Up to that moment when Dahmer kills, Backderf tries to understand him. He shows Dahmer struggling with desires he doesn’t want to have, and slowly losing the struggle. I’m not sure there’s a deeper lesson to that. It’s probably just rubbernecking. But Backderf gives us a hell of a car crash to stare at.

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Hunter S. Thompson is sort of like Ernest Hemingway or Jack Kerouac: his voice is so strong and unmistakable that when you immerse yourself in his writing, you have to work hard to avoid becoming just another acolyte. Look what’s happened to Johnny Depp. He played Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, became such a devotee that he got The Rum Diary made, and according to the foreword to Gonzo: A Graphic Biography of Hunter S. Thompson, he is now trying to get The Curse of Lono turned into a movie too.

That foreword is written by Alan Rinzler, one of Thompson’s many editors and collaborators over the years, and it’s an unforgiving, fascinating piece of writing. I have heard at least one other interview with an editor of Thompson’s (John A. Walsh), and the picture of him that emerges is pretty consistent: he was capable of brilliant writing, but he was also an alcoholic, an addict, and an incredibly difficult human being to deal with. His collaborators miss his talent but aren’t surprised he killed himself, and didn’t necessarily feel close to him personally.

So here’s a man who inserted himself into his journalism, and wrote about himself and his opinions extensively, in a way that bewitches readers into wanting to be like him, but in a way that also doesn’t square with the accounts of those who worked with him. Is the heroic drug use in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas less heroic if you know that his immoderation eventually killed him? Is his relentless pursuit of Nixon in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 less compeling when you know what a political crank he became in later years?

I give Gonzo credit for at least raising these questions. Writer Will Bingley wants to put Thompson’s life into context, and you can see him fighting to do it page by page, to convey Thompson’s irresistible appeal while at the same time making sure we understand that the binge of Las Vegas came after months and months of struggling and failing to report on the Chicano Pride movement in East L.A., and his partner in crime in Las Vegas, Oscar Acosta, was his main contact and friend there. Many times (as with this example) he succeeds.

He also happens to know how to write for the comic book page, and so keeps his text spare, giving Anthony Hope-Smith’s excellent art room to breathe. Hope-Smith never catches his figures straight on, preferring to draw them from slightly above or below, and he uses those changing angles to create dynamism and a sense of unbalance even in scenes where Thompson is sitting still.

But it was in examining these drawings that I first began to understand what was bugging me about Gonzo.

See, Hope-Smith’s drawing of Hunter S. Thompson is preceded by two massively famous, cartoon Thompson avatars: Uncle Duke and Spider Jerusalem. It’s impossible to look at Hope-Smith’s drawings of Hunter S. Thompson and not think of how Garry Trudeau and Darick Robertson drew him. Similarly, it’s impossible to read Bingley’s words and not think of the cartoon version of Hunter S. Thompson the man created for himself.

All those cartoon versions are simply way, way more fun than Gonzo‘s straight-ahead truth. The book would have been better served not trying to compete with them. I’m imagining a drawn version of an older Thompson, during his waning, struggling years, or even a younger Thompson, during the formative time in Puerto Rico that he novelized as The Rum Diary. Gonzo does give some pages to each, but it devotes the bulk of its attention to Thompson’s most creatively fertile years, his peak from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. That’s exactly the Thompson we already know intimately, and no matter how Bingley fights to give us a fresh perspective it can’t help but feel a little familiar.

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Brian K. Vaughan is an unusual case in the modern comic-book world. He’s one of a very small number of creators beloved by both mainstream readers and what I guess we could call “literary” comic book types, someone who’s had commercial success pursuing his own vision, using no one else’s superheroes. Roughly speaking the generation before his had five guys like that (the British big five: Moore, Ennis, Ellis, Morrison, and Gaiman), while this one has only three: Brian K. Vaughan, Bill Willingham, and Brian Wood. Willingham and Wood both have ongoing titles, but ever since Ex Machina ended, about 18 months ago, we’ve all been waiting for what Vaughan would do next.

The immodestly-named Saga is what, and I’m pretty excited about it. Where both of his previous big projects (Ex Machina and Y: The Last Man) were constrained at least a little by their ties to the real world, Saga is a leap into pure fabulism. There are warring clans on faraway planets, clashes between magicians and TV-headed robots, and a baby born to parents from enemy sides. In that broad sense it’s a bit stitched together using off-the-shelf sci-fi tropes, but the specifics, and the way Vaughan handles them, feel original and specific.

Part of that can be attributed to artist Fiona Staples, in particular her character design, and part of it to the controlled way Vaughan doles out information in this opening issue. He knows enough to highlight the elements that are original rather than the many borrowed from convention.

I was never as big a fan of Y: The Last Man as some, and as I wrote in my wrap-up review, I appreciated Ex Machina more as a reflection of New York than as a well-controlled complete story. Both titles started strong and then lost focus, so it’s hard not to be apprehensive that the same could happen to Saga. Nevertheless, it is starting quite strong, in many ways stronger than either of the last two. Again, I partly credit Fiona Staples, whose art is miles better than Pia Guerra’s (Y) and considerably better than Tony Harris’s (Ex Machina). Better art makes a richer world.

One little bonus: by the standards of the current market Saga #1 is cheap, $2.99 for 64 pages with no ads. Image is making it as easy as they can for you to check it out, and I recommend you take them up on it when the second printing hits stores tomorrow.

Short preview here.

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Goliath has a solid concept: Goliath doesn’t actually want to fight. He’s tricked into it by his captain, who has sold the Philistine king on the idea of ending the war with the Israelites by menacing them with a champion they dare not face. And it’s good for some solid laughs, especially in the beginning.

But author Tom Gauld doesn’t account enough for the fact that we all know how the story ends, so there’s no suspense, and in the absence of suspense he needs to work harder to keep things entertaining. Goliath sits around and does nothing waiting for the Israelites to respond to his challenge, and, um, that’s a little boring? The Goliath story offers so many juicy thematic possibilities, and as far as I can tell he doesn’t pick them up. The whole book never advances beyond its concept.

PDF preview here.

Belgian author/artist Hermann shows why he’s a comic-book legend in Europe with Afrika, first published in 2007 but newly translated into English for Dark Horse. It’s an impeccably told, beautifully painted tale about a park ranger and reporter in Africa who accidentally witness a government massacre and must go on the run.

Well-told, beautifully painted—and yet kind of anachronistic. Even for a Belgian born in 1938, 2007 seems too late to still be telling stories about white heroes against an African backdrop. That feels like something we were doing in 1967 and should have outgrown by now.

Preview here.

You’d think the story of a young girl’s perspective on the fall of Communism in 1980s Poland would be pretty gripping, right? It should have been, but about two-thirds of Marzi needed to be edited out. It seems like memoirist Marzena Sowa included every single last little detail she could remember about her childhood, and while some of these could have served to establish an atmosphere, all of them together crush her story under the weight of their triviality. I was angry at this book when I first got it, for having so little regard for its audience’s experience; now I just think of it as a wasted opportunity by a first-time author with a great personal story to tell and no editor to help her tell it well.

I’ve discussed why I don’t think comics translate to movies nearly as well as people expect them to; The Blue Dragon is an object lesson in how you can’t just translate any old dialogue to the comic book page either. Robert Lepage is apparently some kind of  theater deity in Canada, but his talky dialogue just sits there, completely static and clunky, when it’s packed into comic book panels and dialogue bubbles, even though Fred Jourdain’s watercolor art is breathtakingly gorgeous. Too gorgeous, in fact, to pay attention to characters’ facial expressions. Play dialogue is designed for audiences that can’t see faces, but it seems perverse to translate that limitation to comics.

So far, rather than trying to continue the meta-story of the original Bulletproof Coffin limited series, in The Bulletproof Coffin Disinterred David Hine and Shaky Kane seem happy to tell weird little tales patterned on forgotten genres from the 1950s. Since said tales are so far a blast, I’m going with it.

When Ted McKeever’s last series META4 launched, I had no idea where it was going and remained in the dark right up until the end, when it made a half turn and became one of my favorite comics of 2011. Mondo is starting more conventionally (which says something about McKeever, given that it’s about a radioactive superchicken/man), and now more than ever I’m willing to hang on and see what he has in mind.

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, whose work I’ve loved in Criminal and liked okay in Incognito, take their signature noir style over to horror with Fatale. I haven’t figured it out yet, to be honest, and I think I’d recommend waiting for the trade to see if they can pull it all together in the end. There are multiple threads of story from different eras, and three issues in it’s still not at all clear how they relate to one another.

Another where I’d wait for the trade, fortunately due out in just a couple of weeks!—not because Terry Moore is unclear at all about what he’s doing but because he takes awhile to unfold his plot. But that plot is engrossing and hardly anyone does facial expression better. In fact, aspiring comic artists must check out his recent one-shots How to Draw Women and How to Draw Expressions (both available through his store, click on “Related Books”). Both give indispensable advice in areas where comics are too often lacking.

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Let me start with the aspect of Dotter of her Father’s Eyes that I like best: the story of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia. To the extent Lucia is remembered at all today, it is as the girl who wanted to marry Samuel Beckett but ended up in an insane asylum. Authors Mary and Bryan Talbot do a great thing in reclaiming her story from that shallow half-memory, giving her autonomy and life as a character.

They trace her ambitions and rising stardom in the then brand-new field of modern dance. They show her struggling to gain her independence at a time when an independent career for an unmarried woman was barely thinkable, and they argue it was largely the hidebound conservatism of her father, the titan of Modernism, that held her back. Eventually, frustrated and stifled, she lashes out at her mother and is committed.

Less successful is the story Mary Talbot tells about her relationship with her own father, the Joyce scholar James Atherton. Apparently, like Joyce he was a monster to his daughter even as the world adored him. As I have complained before about these monster-parent memoirs, there is no resolution here apart from “and then I grew up.”

Least successful of all, though, is the very decision to run Lucia and Mary’s stories in parallel. Mary, who narrates her own story, never stops to comment on why she is also narrating the Lucia James story, or to speculate on why she got a happy ending and Lucia did not. Was it because she was better able to achieve her professional ambitions? She did after all become a relatively prolific academic author in her own right, publishing multiple works on feminism and culture. Was it because she got to marry the love of her life while Lucia didn’t?

Above all: what larger lessons does she want us to deduce from the bad parenting records of these two great men? Obviously what attracts a reader’s interest will be those great names, Joyce and in his wake Atherton. If we aren’t offered any lessons beyond the fact that often our idols have feet of clay, well, we kind of knew that already. If there was something more to be said about, I don’t know, the sexism inherent in the Joycean project, I wish Mary Talbot would have gone ahead and said it.

One final slight quibble: the art is for the most part quite good, especially in the Lucia sections. In the opening, though, and in all subsequent pages where we’re meant to be seeing present-day Mary, I think Bryan Talbot draws her too young-looking. On the one hand this is sort of charming, a man drawing the flattering portrait of his wife. But drawings in comics are also carriers of information, and I was literally lost until I figured out that the late-thirtiesish woman I saw in present-day scenes was supposed to be the same little girl who was about five or six in the early 1950s.

Preview here.

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