Fantagraphics: Anya Davidson's Band For Life

A number of the cartoonists who had been publishing through Dan Nadel's PictureBox chose to go to Fantagraphics after Nadel shuttered his business. Given that their aesthetic interests were very closely aligned, this is a move that has made sense. Foremost among the newer artists whose work first appeared with PictureBox is Anya Davidson, whose School Spirits was remarkable in the way it captured teenage friendships, psychedelic weirdness and rock 'n roll. In her new collection of strips, Band For Life, the essence of the book is not the scene or even the music (both of which are left intentionally vague) but rather the camaraderie of the band as it negotiates following one's aesthetic dreams with the realities of daily life as well as the kind of conflicts that can only occur in a highly emotionally charged environment like being in a band.

With a style that's somewhere between Ted May and Pedro Bell (the artist behind the Funkadelic album covers), Davidson creates a world of lovable misfits, mutants and weirdos doing something they love. Davidson clearly has affection for all of her characters, flaws and all, and it's clear that she wants the reader to love them as well. It's a story of people wanting to be someone or somewhere other than where they are right now and how the possibilities that open up in the moment by playing in a band create a new kind of narrative. Davidson has a real talent for juggling multiple character-driven narratives all at once, and it's especially tricky in this story because characters from different narratives often overlap in surprising ways. Over the course of each two to three page episode, Davidson manages to provide equal time for character development for of the members of the band plus a number of the supporting characters as well. If the book has a flaw, it's that it ends right in the middle of an unresolved story. It would have actually been preferable to cut the book off a few pages earlier to give a more cohesive ending, and pick up again with a second volume at a more appropriate starting point.

That's a quibble, because the reality is that I simply never wanted the book to end. There is a very slow-brewing overarching plotline, but what's more important are the day-to-day activities of the band Guntit, their problems, their love lives and the rare but always welcomed gigs. There's Linda, the fiery-tempered lead singer; Renato, the tattoo artist and guitarist who's had an unrequited crush on her for years; Krang, who at first lived in a junkyard and then moved in with his boyfriend; Zot, the sort of anthropomorphic dog who has a lot of family issues to deal with; and Annimal, the alcoholic drummer with young twin girls and a toxic ex-boyfriend who won't leave her alone. Annimal screws up on multiple occasions in big ways, but I found her to be the most interesting character by far. She's a mixture of crippling self-doubt and powerful self-expression, as she is constantly battling to try to be her best self and often loses. Unlike Linda, who's passionate but often a one-note character, Annimal veers between sobriety and blackouts, fierce freedom and codependence, and narcissism and empathy. 

Davidson's use of color and her truly strange character designs make every panel interesting to look at, which was a crucial strategy because in reality this book is a lot of talking heads. Davidson makes sure that some of the heads look like mutants and that they range from green to orange to purple. The lurid quality of the colors and the way she uses color dissonance to mimic the sonic dissonance of the band is clever. Nothing is too outrageous, and it's this part of the aesthetic that reminds me so much of Pedro Bell by way of the Archies. The Ted May influence refers to the glorious looseness of her line, reminiscent of May's high school heavy metal stories. Influences aside, the complexity of the character narratives are something that Davidson used to great effect in School Spirits and Lovers In The Garden, as the ripple effects from one set of characters carried over to others in interesting and unexpected ways. What's important to understand in the course of reading this book is that Davidson doesn't really seem to have an endgame in mind. Sure, the band goes through ups and downs as Renato is nearly killed by a mobster, Annimal gets kicked out of the band, the band starts writing songs and eventually records a demo that gets picked up by a small label. That's all part of the overarching story that I mentioned, but it takes over 250 pages just to get to this point of Guntit's story. Davidson seems way too invested in these characters, like in the way the Hernandez Brothers are invested in their characters, to want to wrap up their stories any time soon. 

The characters and situations in this book are malleable in such a way that Davidson can use them to tell any kind of story. She can pour on family drama, she can go for laughs, she can address political issues, she can comment on art and music and she can simply pair off different characters at different times just to see what might happen. All of Davidson's work feels personal, but one senses that Band For Life goes even deeper. Like Charles Schulz and Peanuts, I don't think that any one character in particular is a Davidson stand-in, but rather each member of the cast perhaps represents a different aspect of her personality or is a stand-in for someone she knows. Davidson can be as sincere or as satirical as she wants, and the strip can stand up to those kinds of radical shifts in tone. That's because whatever tangent Davidson might lean into for a while, she always snaps back to the characters and their stories before long, keeping the reader engaged. I'm not sure she will keep this up as a life-long work, but these characters are bursting with the kind of ideas and energy that could be kept up indefinitely, providing new surprises along the way for both artist and reader alike.

Retrofit: Anya Davidson and Leela Corman

Lovers In The Garden, by Anya Davidson. This bonkers crime-romance comic set in the 1970s reminds me of the sort of thing that Elmore Leonard might write. It's a series of character vignettes tied together by a central plot of two hitmen being sent to kill their latest target. The construction of that plot is seamless, even as Davidson throws in a number of twists that alter the balance of the story. That said, the plot really exists as a way for Davidson to explore a series of different kinds of relationships. The first is the relationship between a reporter and a story subject, as Elyse Saint-Michel interviews a man named Flashback, who happens to be a hitman. She's trying to get him to give her some info on his boss, a scummy heroin dealer named Dog, and he winds up telling her some of his life story. The second relationship we see is that of the other hitman, Shephard, and a young woman named Coral Gables. They are in love, so much so that Shephard wants to quit the business.

The next relationship moves the plot forward a bit, as Dog asks the hitmen to do one last job, and he'll allow Shephard to quit. After they leave, he tells another employee, a woman named Mystic Blue, to kill them both after they complete the job. When we meet Elyse's boyfriend Chip, when we see that Coral is actually an undercover copy, and that Mystic wants to double-cross her boss, one of the themes of the story clearly emerges: broken relationships that actively choke off trust and support in the face of ambition and greed. It's not even a good vs evil issue, as Elyse and Coral are very much using others to get what they want, even if their goals are noble. Davidson actually plants doubt even there, as the "good" characters want to get the big scoop or bust a drug dealer, but they're doing it to advance, not because they are focused on doing the right thing. Another theme that Davidson hints at is how sexual love can be ephemeral and even deceptive. The sexual relationships between Coral and Shephard and Elyse & her boyfriend had no real depth.

The setting is another interesting factor in this comic. The 1970s was an era of a revolution of rising expectations, as women and people of different races started seeing social and cultural advancement as a real possibility. As such, two of the key characters in the story are African-American women, and the key antagonist (Mystic Blue) is a woman who is fed up with her position in Dog's gang. Force is a means to an end. Davidson moves the story to an explosive and tense climax, switching points of view so that the reader can better see exactly how which people with guns are in facing each other and in what position. All of that serves as a way of revealing who the true lovers are, in a fraternal but still remarkably deep way: Flashback and Shephard. When the shooting starts, we flash back to Viet Nam, where Flashback saves Shephard. They faced trauma together and still had each other as homeless people when they were taken in by the drug lord, who started them slowly until he moved them up to hitmen. One of the best lines in the story comes from Flashback: "Like a lobster in a pot of water. The temperature rose so gradually I didn't realize I was being boiled alive." Dog exploited them until they were too much in his debt and his thrall for them to do anything different. In an era where being able to define oneself was its hallmark, Shephard and Flashback were the only two characters who weren't able to do this, until Flashback found the same kind of courage that served him in saving Shephard in Viet Nam. Theirs is the only love story with a happy ending (for as long as it might last) in the book.

The line is Davidson's usual expressive, loose and and even cartoony style. Interestingly, it's mostly the characters who get solid black line drawings. Everything else is done in colored pencil, including most of the backgrounds and even many of the street scenes. It's a clever way of pushing the characters forward ahead of everything else, even as the colors themselves have a slightly ratty and psychedelic character to them. It's that mix of punk and psychedelia that is Davidson's trademark, and it's an especially clever strategy given the book's obsession with artifice vs reality. Davidson suggests that it's all artifice on one level, everything but the kind of true friendship that lasts through bullets and bombs and through madness and destitution. Despite all of the sleaze and backbiting in this comic, it still retains an almost sweet level of optimism in the face of everything, precisely because of that true friendship.

We All Wish For Deadly Force, by Leela Corman. It's remarkable how much thematic cohesion there is in this collection of Leela Corman's short stories. I've been reading Corman's comics for nearly twenty years, when she started out with her Flim-Flam minicomics and early books like Subway Series and Queen's Day. Since that time, her work has become more explicitly about gender, cultural mores, personal and ethnic identity, class and sexism. All of these topic were explored in her book Unterzakhn, as Corman has almost always written fiction. As such, I was surprised to see so much autobio in this book, even if it addressed most of the same issues she's always been interested in. For example, the bonds of family are a crucial element in the book, and in particular the way family carries on after trauma and tragedy.

Consider "The Wound That Never Heals" and "Yahrzeit". The former directly addresses the sudden death of her toddler daughter Rosalie and the latter addresses her grandfather possibly witnessing his family dying during World War II. Corman is an especially sharp writer, and she approaches these horrors from a number of different angles. There is the immediate, visceral approach, where she depicts the hypervigilance that results from PTSD as being a sort of shadowy force that forces her to appear normal. There's the clinical approach, where she breaks down precisely what's happening in her brain and why. There's the philosophical approach, which leads to the title descriptor of the first story. There's also the generational approach, wherein she imagines her grandfather carrying around the dead as a burden or like a phantom limb, just as she does. She also imagines another world where her daughter is alive and wonders if her grandfather ever did the same.In both stories, she makes the point that what others view as strength is simply our survival instinct as animals, and acceptance of the permanence of trauma is the only thing that can help one accept it. The former story vividly uses color in unconventional ways, contrasting horror with bright backgrounds as a way of highlighting the dissonance of looking normal while living with PTSD. The latter story is a more traditional Corman creation, as the contrast here is with her usual thin line and the roughly-penned outline of the dead.

Corman's identity as a Jewish person is also key in this collection. It's something that ties into identity and as a narrative for loss. Even a lightweight story like "Brooklyn Bellydance Adventure", which was about Corman teaching the discipline to Jewish women of Russian descent, is incredibly sharply-observed in terms of what they shared and what was foreign. "This Way To Progress" is about her grandparents, through the device of the kind of furniture she chooses to have and the way it reminds her of her family. A chair is emblematic of a place to sit and reflect in one's home, and the modernist chairs her grandparents chose reflected their progressivism, of leaving behind horror and tragedy, of an openness to new ideas. "Irreducibles" similarly starts off in a lighthearted manner as it talks about certain essential aspects of Jewish identity, joking about being in a cabal or craving gefilte fish. What is unique about Jewish culture is that despite its many rules that are inexplicable to outsiders, the idea of what being a "good Jew" means is remarkably open to interpretation. Corman seizes on the idea that kvetching (complaining) is one of these "irreducibles", for the sheer pleasure of the act--even if the complaint has been assuaged. Seizing on these lighthearted ideas develops into the darker aspects, like an ever-present feeling of doom that everything could collapse and Jews could be rounded up again. Once again, Corman advocates not resisting or ignoring that feeling, but rather accepting it and using it effectively. "The Book Of The Dead" seizes on that idea and talks about the exile from France her grandparents faced and how living in Brooklyn altered family dynamics forever.

An unstated theme in the book is guilt. Survivor's guilt for Corman being alive and and her daughter not, guilt for being alive while a number of her relatives died in the Holocaust, guilt for what she acknowledges is the privilege of being an artist, and guilt for accidentally getting to live in a time and place that's given her some semblance of security and consistence. That is addressed specifically in "The Book Of The Dead", as the artist and a survivor can only do their best to honor the dead, show gratitude toward those who gave her an opportunity to create and acknowledge one's debts. Acceptance of guilt, acceptance of trauma, and acceptance of the full beauty and horror regarding the implications of one's ethnic heritage are the only way out of the inevitable side effects of trauma, Corman suggests. The only way out is through. The interstitial pieces in the book, done in colored pencil, are raw and visceral memories of Rosalie and current anecdotes about missing her and dealing with monstrous people in public who lack any sense of empathy toward children.

Corman, partly through her bellydancer friend Luna of Cairo, also discusses the ways in which women have and are ignored, humiliated and outright abused in society. While the particular brand of sexism she faces in Egypt is particular to that country and culture, it is not to suggest that America or any other country is any less openly sexist and abusive toward women, and that society at large tolerates sexual assault and harassment. One of Luna's stories involves women working hard to elect a presidential candidate who did a great deal to help fight back against sexual assault, making an example out of a public gang rape on a city street. In the story "It's Always Been Here", Corman details the history of a well that was a part of a shrine to Aphrodite and the generations of women who came with supplications regarding having children, dealing with abusive husbands, etc. All of these stories reflect ways in which women have and can care for other women in a position of strength and authority. The latter story hints at ways in which that authority can be weakened over time but also suggests that it's something that can be tapped into again at any time. Corman explores a lot of dark places in this book, both within and without her, but the last resonant theme is that of survival. She may play down the strength necessary to survive, but what Corman does as an artist in this book is not just convey survival, but articulate the ways she has managed to cope with the weight of her own traumas in a manner that's remarkably beautiful, expressive and powerful.