Slipping Through The Shadows With Roman Muradov

Roman Muradov is one of the few cartoonists I can think of who is somehow an appropriate fit for NoBrow, Uncivilized Books, Kus! and Retrofit. Take Jacob Bladders And The State Of The Art (Uncivilized), for example. The mystery angle, satirical elements and stark black & white drawings are all perfect fits for the highbrow/lowbrow mix that Uncivilized is known for. (In A Sense) Lost & Found  (NoBrow) is far more clearly laid out and an easier read in general, and its use of color and its lush design puts it firmly in that NoBrow aesthetic. The End Of A Fence is a smaller-sized art object in vivid color, making it a nice fit in the Kus! family. They're all unmistakably Muradov in terms of the whimsical, angular drawings; a continuous use of shadow; and a bone-dry sense of humor that occasionally veers into too-clever preciousness.

Jacob Bladders is a sort of noir parody set in a ruthless 1940s publishing world where illustrators can get roughed up to get at their work. Even if it's the mediocre work of the titular cartoonist, whose drawing of "career ladders" for the New York Daily News provides steady filler. In many ways, this entire book is a shaggy dog joke, as it imagines Twitter existing in a slightly different form in that era (called Tweeter), with certain elite tweeterers being named as Twitterateurs, leading to the punchline of a book heavily influenced by the aesthetic of painter Paul Klee. The book claims that his ink-and-watercolor piece The Twittering Machine (below) was a satire of Tweeter, providing a groaner of an end for that shaggy dog joke. While Muradov's figures sometimes resemble that of Klee's fellow Der Blaue Reiter member Wassily Kandinsky, the famous Klee smudges are omnipresent in this comic, often deliberately obscuring dialogue and even action. This is a book about conspiracies at a high level, thuggishness and brute force at a low level, and art theory at an abstract and concrete level, with the drawings in an Expressionist style and the narrative being all about the value and meaning of art, especially with regard to how it interacts with commerce. This is decidedly the densest of Muradov's comics, and there are points when visual and narrative thickness becomes nearly incoherent, but Muradov is always able to bring it clearly back around to the narrative just in time.

The End Of A Fence has a pretty simple high concept: a world where one can be redirected to a different area where one can meet one's perfect match. The book starts with a break-up and a woman with a perfectly coiffed bun hairstyle going elsewhere. In this book, the characters are smooth and essentially piles of geometric figures carefully arranged to create what looks like people. The story is fairly predictable, as the protagonist learns that it's the differences that make relationships interesting, and too much agreement is not only boring, but can lead to conflict on its own. This was what I meant by Muradov's comics being a bit on the precious side, because if it wasn't for the remarkable use of color, this would be a fairly generic story. Indeed, Muradov's juxtaposition of colors makes the characters shimmer and shine on the page. The way Muradov dips colors into pitch black and out again is a particular visual highlight, as is his unusual lettering and neologisms that develop out of text that's slightly altered and bent. In Muradov's comics, reality has a slightly elastic quality, and the dance of color forms across the page is what makes this comic fun to look at; the actual text is of far lesser importance.

(In A Sense) Lost & Found felt like a kind of middle ground, wherein Muradov used a traditional comics grid (9 panels) and a russet-brown/deep purple color wash to tell this story of lurking in the city's shadows. Muradov is fond of doing homages to other artists and writers, and the introductory line of this comic ("F. Premise awoke one morning from troubled dreams to find that her innocence had gone missing...") seems to be a direct reference to Franz Kafka's classic The Metamorphosis, wherein "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." In the case of Ms. Premise, that transformation was similar to poor Gregor's in that she instantly became an outcast; her father told her to not ever leave the house now that it was gone. Exactly what "innocence" meant in the context of the story is left deliberately vague; it could be an awareness of how the world works (especially with regard to how women are treated), it could be one's virginity, but it's definitely something specific to being a woman.

She launches a quest to track it down, leading her to a fatalistically depressed bookseller who saves her from an angry mob. From there, she follows a clue to an underground series of merchants where she learns that her innocence had been taken to a certain address. She's forced to put on a pair of baggy pants to disguise her gender before she goes out, however. Eventually, she discovers her innocence has been mass-produced to make neckerchiefs, at which point she realizes she doesn't need it anymore. After that final, life-changing encounter, she negotiates her environment that shifts from the nightmare world of Pablo Picasso's Guernica to The Dance, by Henri Matisse. In other words, from the brutality of a judgmental world to a way of reclaiming her innocence on her own terms. Unlike Gregor Samsa, F. Premise lives through the nightmare and comes out the other side, thanks entirely to her own newfound understanding of her self and the power that not caring about social mores gives one. At the very end, she is literally writing her own story as she repeats the first line of the book's narrative, an indicator that her identity is something that can never be taken away from her, but it can be given away. The result of her quest was discovering that she had indeed never really lost it in the first place, but rather it had transformed into something she, and only she, had control over. Once again, the use of the grid and the mixture of total storytelling clarity mixed in with shadows, darkness and visual chaos made for a perfect blend in representing someone who started to see the familiar world as something new and confusing.

David B Explosion

Other than his epic, classic Epileptic, there's been precious little of French master David B's output available in English. Dribs and drabs appeared in anthologies like Mome (later collected in The Armed Garden And Other Stories), short collections like Nocturnal Conspiracies, and single issues like Babel. The last year has seen three major releases in English by a cartoonist who's on my short list of Greatest Cartoonists Alive. They all share his emphasis on spotting blacks to create an atmosphere of oppressiveness and mystery, as well as mixing fantasy and reality in such a way that it's difficult to differentiate fact from fiction. Above all else, David B is about propelling his stories ever forward, leading the eye briskly across a page filled with often ghoulish and frightening details.

Britain's SelfMadeHero published his Best Of Enemies: A History of US and Middle East Relations (Part One: 1783-1953), written by historian Jean-Pierre Filiu. Though not written by David B, his imprint is all over it. Indeed, Filiu also writes this text as something meant to be playfully told, which plays out in the first chapter when he inserts speeches from George W Bush and Dick Chaney into the mouths of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. In a crisp and clear manner, Filiu hits the main highlights of the nature of the relationship of the US and the Middle East, plainly calling out barbaric behavior on both sides without demonizing either. His analysis of the early 19th century conflict between the US and the pirate city of Tripoli was astute and fascinating, and he couldn't have called upon a more appropriate artist than David B to illustrate it. Indeed, anyone who's read Epileptic knows that as a child he was obsessed with drawing battles with huge armies, frequently Arabs or Moors. The weight of the French-Algerian conflict pressed his imagination powerfully as a child, as did the history of conflict tied to beliefs in general. The juxtaposition of holy wars and obscene loss of life, that conflict of life and death, is at the heart of much of his work.

It was also interesting to read about this US-Tripoli conflict in part because it's little-taught in most American textbooks. I would imagine one reason why is that the US never scored a decisive victory; it was the actions of others that ended Mediterranean piracy. The chapters "Oil" and "Coup d'etat" get at the heart of US gunboat diplomacy and expansionism. In this age of Islamophobia, it's fascinating to read about how the US was once firmly on the side of the Palestinians retaining their land, in part because of the blatant (and self-avowed) anti-Semitism of key US policy makers. Without as much fighting to depict, David B cleverly depicts otherwise dry pages regarding negotiations and backstabbing with images of characters stretching out and acting as part of oil pipes. The "Coup" chapter carefully details the first time the US openly overthrew another world power, as they conspired to bring down the Iranian government and install the Shah. In a lesson that is never learned, one must always be careful of the allies one makes under duress in order to achieve a short-term political goal. While Filiu is a witty and incisive historian, there's no question that it's David B's brilliance that makes this such a lively read, and the model for all future history books that are published in comics form.

Also published through SelfMadeHero (and in the US, Abrams Comic Arts), Black Paths is David B's masterful blend of fact and fiction. Set in the aftermath of World War I in a small northern Italian city, the factual aspects of the book are every bit as crazy as the characters and stories that he makes up. The city of Fiume is taken by Italian war hero Gabriele D'Annunzio, a poet-soldier whose followers set out to establish a utopia as they seceded from Italy and opposed planned annexation by Croatia. This real-life figure is brought to life spectacularly by David B, who depicts him as a tiny, bald figure with eccentric tastes who is strongly influenced by the Dada movement. While his story is an important part of Black Paths, providing its most colorful and funniest scenes, David B also inserts a heist storyline and a love story into the action of a city that has descended into a Hobbesian state of nature, where life is "nasty, brutish and short". Fistfights constantly break out in the city, while Italian criminals are using it to ship stolen goods into and out of. The heist is the least interesting aspect of the story, but David B wisely shoves it to the back of his interests as soon as all the principal players are introduced.

Instead, he's more interested in examining the psychology of World War I through the eyes of Lauriano, a soldier who is also a writer and thinker. His share of the heist cut is getting access to the beautiful singer Mina, a strongly self-possessed woman who nonetheless is looking for a way out of the sheer, violent chaos of Fiume. She mostly functions as a kind of lens on Lauriano's nature as she tries to understand his pain and his overall plan. Indeed, it boils down to Lauriano undergoing a kind of trauma where he sees a dead soldier friend who urges him to arrange a burial despite the fact that his body is unavailable. In a dizzying climax that sees David B go way over the top in terms of mistaken identities, audacious plans (a tank becomes involved), spiritual gestures that are really gags (a statue of St Francis that's a running joke as a McGuffin suddenly becomes the key to resolving the final conflict), everyone winds up with a happy ending. Of course, David B doesn't stop there, as a speech from Mina earlier in the book both fleshes her out as her own person and reduces Lauriano back to his component parts: books. This is a thinking man's genre comic, jam-packed with action and excitement yet still steeped in history, unexpected character development and truly unexpected twists.

There's an easter egg for David B readers in Black Paths in that Lauriano writes for a publication called Incidents In The Night. That is a reference to an earlier work by the same name, which is one of David B's densest, craziest and most entertaining comics. Recently translated by novelist Brian Evenson and his daughter Sarah, I'd rank this only behind Epileptic as the author's most personal and audacious creations. It feels strongly influenced by classic conspiracy stories like Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, but it also has elements of autobiography and long digressions on history that fit into David B's usual storytelling tendencies. Many of David B's early comics were inspired by dreams and had a certain dream logic in how they depicted the facts and images of the things he encountered. Incidents In The Night starts out that way, as he dreams about finding a publication by that name in a bookstore. When he wakes up, he visits several esoteric bookstores in an effort to see if it actually exists.

This book has the trappings of a detective novel before it mutates into a book about conspiracies and mysticism. Instead of smoky bars or creepy temples, the action takes place in bizarre bookstores, including one with mountains of books that effectively require an archeological dig to find anything. The magazine turns out to have been begun by a Bonapartist named Emile Travers, who has managed to escape the Angel of Death (a prominent character) by leaping from book to book. Along the way, David B gains the power to take on the form of paper or shadow as he his forced by Travers to find a way to protect him from the angel of death. Along the way, David B has a long discussion with a bookstore proprietor about the history of genocide, and the terrible, forgotten Greek god Enn, the god of extermination and oblivion. The book's plot becomes increasingly complex as Travers' initial plans become deadlier and more morbid, as he slaughters an office of journalists he hired to reboot the magazine as a sacrifice to Enn. David B picks up allies in a journalist who seems destined to double as a romantic interest and a tough policeman who specializes in esoteric crimes, but the book (conceived to be the first of several) ends on a surprising cliffhanger.

Every theme, idea and interest of David B is distilled in this single book. Destruction, genocide, cults of personality, mysticism, conspiracies and the tiniest clues in unlocking them, the protocols of secret societies and forbidden religions are all here. The book also directly and metaphorically touches on something very important: David B wants immortality as a writer. He wants to cheat the Angel of Death to become, like Lauriano, a man composed of the books he wrote. While Travers initially seems to be an example in how to do this, what he really wants is Nothing: oblivion, the void, the extermination of all that his memorable. No wonder he hides out in an imaginary book called "The Desert", which consists solely of the letter "n": an invocation of and prayer to dread Enn, an almost Cthulu-like presence who literally looms over the book with the giant N on top of Travers' image. David B's art wasn't quite as polished here as it is now, as there's a little less detail and a little more white space. Still, his character design, story flow and stark nature of the imagery are all flawless and striking. Here's hoping that American publisher Uncivilized Books is able to translate future volumes of this story.