Sequart Reprints: Periodicals

In this column, I've mostly paid attention to the avalanche of quality graphic novels that have been released of late (I have a huge stack still demanding my attention) as well as the large variety of minicomics that grow ever more intricate. There's a big pile of the latter from SPX that will also get a full hearing soon. But what of that disappearing species, the serial alternative comic? Love and Rockets is still going strong of course, but let's take a look at recent issues of some other series, new and old.

DORK #11 (by Evan Dorkin, Slave Labor Graphics)

Evan Dorkin has always been an interesting touchstone creator of sorts for me. He's one of the rare artists who's liked by fans of even the most abstract alt-comics as well as mainstream fans. In fact, he's one of the most prominent "gateway" creators, someone whose work is accessible to mainstream fans but can lead them in other directions. His old Hectic Planet series may have begun as a sci-fi series, but it evolved into something quite different. It became a book about relationships with a sci-fi setting--both about friends and lovers. Certainly Love and Rockets had to have been a huge influence on him by that point, but it was all filtered through his own point of view. That point of view is one of someone who was raised on pop culture & comics, particularly Marvels. As far away from that sort of thing he is now in certain ways, he can't help but reference them in his humor.

That sense of humor is what makes Dorkin such a popular creator. No matter what he's writing or drawing, there's always a manic feel to every word, every panel. Early in his career, Dorkin compensated for his perceived lack of talent by overstuffing every panel full of Will Elder-esque "chicken fat". Now that he's a much more skilled draftsman, that mania remains, only it's on a well-designed page. Dorkin's relationship with pop culture is one of love-hate: his Eltingville Club stories, depicting the misadventures of four genre-loving nerds, is stinging in its depictions of the pathetic lives of these unpleasant individuals. Yet at the same time, there's an undercurrent of pity present as well--and even a certain degree of empathy. Above all else, Dorkin is concerned about his story, his characters and getting laughs--yet there's always a subtext of anger, frustration, depression and hatred towards the world but especially himself.

The latest issue of Dork distills all of this down to its purest form: 24 pages of nothing but gags. Some of them are single-panel, others are seven 4-panel strips, and there are a few extended sequences thrown in there. The issue began as something that Dorkin thought would be easy, just a bunch of gags strung together. But putting together joke after joke and making each one funny was a monstrous task. Dorkin really let his id wander in a lot of them, as his jokes became more vicious and nastier than usual, almost at an early Ivan Brunetti-level. Whether or not an individual finds them funny will vary, of course, but I did want to speak to the way that Dorkin works.

Reading this issue makes me appreciate the sheer effort Dorkin put forth to sell each joke. Take a one-panel cartoon. We see a furball with a hat and glasses having doggie-style sex with a naked woman. The caption reads, "My favorite porn star was Vixxen St. Clair, whose specialty was taking itt up the ass". The drawing itself is sort of funny, the work behind the pop-culture pun (Cousin Itt from the Addams Family) was admirable, the little detail of coming up with a dead-on porn star name was nice, but what took the joke over the top was the word balloon from It: "BRRPIDIT-BIPIBITIBIF BDRRHRHR-HBDRGT!" Dorkin's ability to really sell a joke, to go the whatever extreme was necessary to make the initial idea funny, is on display throughout the issue.

There are times when Dorkin doesn't care if you don't get the reference, but takes the joke to its logical extreme anyway. "The Prisoner of Second Avenue", featuring #6 asking where he was, and a St Marks Place punker naturally saying "You're in the village". You have to be familiar with The Prisoner and New York to really get enjoy that joke, but that's a case of Dorkin aiming some of his humor at certain audiences and making other gags more universal. "David Byrne Gets Alzheimer's" has the singer of course waking up in bed, saying "This is not my beautiful house", etc.

The violent gags are among the funniest in the book; Dorkin really cuts to the bone on them when he combines a familiar reference with a violent end. For example, "Tintin In Cambodia" is a one-panel gag that sees Tintin and Snowy bound, with their throats slit. "Bad Dad" is a page about an awful, abusive father making demented wisecracks to his son as he does ever-more repulsive and over-the-top things. The latter strip speaks not only to the antipathy he feels toward his own father, but there's also an extra undercurrent of discomfort now that Dorkin himself is a father.

Finally, I also rather enjoy his cultural and comics commentary, like his strip entitled "If Other Media Were As Sad As Comic Books" featuring characters saying things like "Dude! I saw this movie last night and they showed a character in it reading a book!" "Oh, I am in ecstasy!" Then there's the "Save CBGB's" strip, where the characters "forgot what a complete shithole this shithole was!"

This just scratches the surface--there's page after page of jokes. Some work better than others, but that will certainly depend on the audience. Dorkin has always noted that his work is polarizing even with his own fans, with some preferring Eltingville to Milk and Cheese, Fun Strips to the Murder Family, etc. This labor of love, blood, sweat and clearly many tears may be the greatest value for your entertainment dollar you'll see all year.

American Splendor  #3 (Harvey Pekar & various, DC/Vertigo)

Harvey Pekar is a name familiar to virtually every comics fan these days, thanks to the success of the film adaptation of American Splendor. However, Harv had been chugging along for years, first self-publishing his comics and then having them released by Dark Horse. While we did see an issue a year from Dark Horse, they never really gave his work the promotion and attention it deserved. While other major publishers were busy reissuing collections of Harv's early work (which sold like gangbusters), Dark Horse sat on a decade's worth of his comics--many of which were excellent.

Happily, the success of the film and his reprints opened up all sorts of opportunities: three original graphic novels plus a new series from Vertigo. Vertigo is doing a much better job of not only promoting him but getting an interesting variety of artists to illustrate his stories. It's unfortunate that Pekar didn't get these kinds of resources until very late in his career. It's a bit like Gary Payton signing on with Miami late in his career in order to get that elusive first NBA title--he still had moments of brilliance, but he was no longer a trailblazing force.

That's OK, because even an issue of American Splendor that covers familiar ground is still a unique event in the world of comics. Pekar not only is amazingly skilled in his depiction of quotidian life that is paradoxically poetic in its plainness, his cultural-political tangents & digressions on his career are also fascinating to read. I find his short stories are more effective than most of his graphic novels to date, in part because there's not quite enough narrative in most of his stories to sustain a long-form work. I would guess that's why he chose to write about other people in his latest graphic novels, and took a long look at his childhood in The Quitter.

While all three are quite enjoyable in their own way, there's something about a short Pekar story that is immensely satisfying on its own. The way he changes narrative strategies depending on the kind of story he tells and the type of artist he chooses to illustrate that story have a profound effect on the way the reader experiences them. For example, take "The Battle of the Vacant Lot". It's a story about his childhood and a violent event that took place, so it only made sense for his The Quitter collaborator Dean Haspiel to illustrate it. Haspiel's art is dynamic and stark, with lots of bold blacks, dramatic close-ups and tense compositions. That choice perfectly played up the story of Harvey accidentally hurting a friend of his as a child but feeling a weird sense of power after he did it. As with most of his stories, there's no neat conclusion or wrap-up; Pekar deliberately leaves his anecdotes open-ended for further contemplation by the reader.

"Medicating In the A.M." uses unusually loose art from another frequent contributor, Josh Neufeld. The slightly fuzzy line Neufeld employed nicely reflects the way Pekar felt in the morning as he contemplated what medicines he needed to take to combat his physical and mental problems. After using narrative captions in that first story to gain a little distance, the reader has full access to his thoughts via word balloons.

"Regionalism" employs long-time Pekar workhorses Greg Budgett and Gary Dumm. They're pretty much the working definition of "solid but unspectacular", which is what this story about urban sprawl, increased segregation and ways to combat it via a localized governmental model that encourages cooperation rather than competing for resources. Harv softens the didactic and rhetorical aims of the story by making it a dialogue between himself and a friend, and the art switches between Harvey and the scenarios he describes. One of the most interesting aspects of Pekar (one glossed over in the movie) is his status as a working-class intellectual, a renaissance man with extensive interests in politics, history and literature.

My favorite story was the quintessential quotidian Pekar piece, "Morning Route". Illustrated by Ty Templeton (an inspired choice) and looking like it was shot almost directly from his pencils, he adds a certain warmth to the proceedings. The story simply follows Harv around as he gets medication, goes to the post office, researches a story and buys some cookies for his wife. The undertone, as there almost always is in his stories, is how one man struggles to make sense of his world and feel like he's productive. As one reads his stories over the years, one picks up the thread not of a temporal narrative of his life, but an emotional narrative. Even when there's nothing but despair around him, he still plods through his day. After retiring from his government job and beating cancer a second time, he had to fight to stave off tedium and feelings of uselessness. For Pekar, not having a purpose and an outlet for expression is the same thing as death.


Copykat #1 (MK Reed & Laura Tallardy, Otazine)

Manga is very much outside of my sphere of interest, but I've always enjoyed MK Reed's portrayals of youth and relationships. Her ear for dialogue makes her stories pleasant page-turners. It was a bit odd to see her write for an artist other than herself, and it was even stranger to see the printing/paper quality looking so amateurish. The whole thing felt more like a minicomic than a more professionally produced magazine, although its very crudeness actually made it more enjoyable to look at. Most standard manga (yes, I know there are all sorts of exceptions) is so slick and stylized (especially American attempts at the style) that my eye slides off the page. Quite frequently, I can't hold on to what's on the page. The cruder art, combined with a naturalistically told tale, reduced this difficulty for me.

The story is amusing and given energy by Reed's vivid characterization. Every character is given some sort of depth and is neither entirely likeable nor despicable. The plot is rather familiar: a young woman with a bubbly personality but not much of a grip on practicalities comes to live with her sister in New York, waiting for that big break in the art world. Reality dictated that she had to go find a job, and so she stumbled onto one at the local copy shop. Kat, the title character, is the sort of naive but pushy young woman who is fun to read about in this sort of setting. The reader is drawn to her but also wants to see her take a few lumps in the process of figuring things out.

The one really jarring thing about the art was Tallardy interjecting photographic backgrounds at random throughout the story. I'm not sure if that was a stylistic choice or simply a way to avoid trying to tackle subjects she can't draw. Her art is actually fairly expressive, but it's obvious that she can't do everything she wants on a page yet and there's not much economy to her art. She would do well to perhaps use slightly thinner lines and clean things up a bit in general. I like the way she composes a page, but using thick blacks doesn't really compensate for crude draftsmanship.

Monster Parade #1 (Ben Catmull, Fantagraphics)

It's odd that perhaps the most "mainstream" of the comics I'm reviewing in this column in terms of its trappings is from Fantagraphics, the vanguard publisher of alternative comics. Monster Parade is the new series by former Xeric-grant winner Ben Catmull. His work features a certain ominousness in its atmosphere and setting, lightened by whimsical story elements and absurd situations.

There's a certain interconnectedness in the short stories here, but it's not explicit. Catmull's world is one where monsters are the norm but still inspire wonder. In "Winter Storm", a young boy watches a storm roll in, stoked by a gigantic 4-armed hillbilly who's throwing lightning bolts and stirring up a wind. A huge bird brings the rain, and then the boy comes face to face with a flying whale. As we cut to a train rolling by, the story switches from black and white to the next story's washed-out reds. In "Monster Express", we get a sharply timed comedy of discomfort combined with an off-panel rampaging monster on a train. The story is completely different from anything else in the issue. However, despite the escalating gags from page to page, it still manages to finish on an extremely creepy note.

From there, we segue into the local wildlife doing all sorts of odd things and come upon an image of a creature in a window in a town. The reader is immediately jolted into the next story, "Civilization Illustrated", a faux-academic study of a town surrounded by rivers. This was my favorite story in the book, as Catmull manages to combine comedy, weirdness, and creepiness in one package. There's almost a Lovecraftian feel to some of the images (like the creature in the "deep haunted cellars where no living person should tread"). Then there was the minimalistically depicted war between Louse Land and Mite Ville, two insect cities living underneath a dock. There's not really a narrative here, just a collection of dizzying images that make the reader want to know more about every tidbit offered.

Catmull has always been effective in creating mood, atmosphere and general discomfort for the reader. In the long period of time it took him to publish again, it's clear that he's added a lushness to his work that serves to soften its hard edges and induce a sort of nostalgia for events that never took place and locales that don't exist. That may be the most unsettling part of his art.

Apocalypse Nerd #4 (Peter Bagge, Dark Horse)

Peter Bagge is one of my all-time favorites, and I've enjoyed every series he's released since he ended regular publishing of his classic Hate a few years ago. There's a sense that while he's dabbled with children's comics for DC (Yeah!), a whacked-out Spider-Man story and a book about a comic strip artist & his staff (Sweatshop, also for DC) along with Hate annuals, he's yet to really get back in the groove that made him one of the most important and successful comics artists of the 90's.

Apocalypse Nerd, along with its backup feature Founding Fathers Funnies, is taking him a long way back to that status in my eyes. First of all, he's doing both writing and drawing again for this feature, which wasn't the case for his mainstream work. Second, this material is a return to the sort of freewheeling nihilism that made Hate such a landmark series. Third, the backup feature highlights what he's done best in the past few years: politically-oriented strips for places like Reason and Salon. Applying the cynical, smart-assed Bagge interpretation to sacred cows like the Founding Fathers of the US is instructive both as history and a lesson on how to think about politics today.

The title feature follows two friends in the Pacific Northwest after North Korea nuked Seattle and their wacky hijinx. This issue gives us a bit more information about what's happening in the world at large after civilization more-or-less ceased to function in the area. The protagonists stumbled upon a "nerd camp", as a bunch of academics set up a subsistence farm. That happened to be close to a compound filled with lesbian separatists. A raiding party of native Americans on horseback takes over the men's camp; and Perry, the less macho of our heroes, winds up begging to be taken in by the lesbian compound. They reluctantly allow it after he convinces one less threatening woman to injure him and play upon their sympathies. This sort of flies, as they turn him into a pet, even making him live in a doghouse! The story is typical Bagge over-the-top humor, beginning with a shocking premise and then taking it to its logical extreme. As always, his exaggerated, eyes-popped-out art perfectly matches the story. While his line is perhaps not as precisely rendered as it used to be in the Hate glory days, his unique stylization more than gets the job done.

The real main event of this issue was "Let's Fuck Shit Up!" starring the Beantown Boys--Sam Adams, John Adams, Paul Revere and James Otis. It's a hilarious look at the propaganda, chicanery and crudity of America's revolutionary forefathers. Flipping from year to year, Bagge comically explores attempts made at distorting the facts of the Boston Massacre, the political maneuvering surrounding the Boston Tea Party, Otis' demented public rants, and moneyman John Hancock & Sam Adams fleeing by gilded carriage when the battle of Lexington broke out. Bagge manages to accurately convey historical detail with modern dialogue, producing a highly insolent look at history. Considering the way that the Founding Fathers are mythologized in American school systems, getting a taste of the wackiness that truly surrounded the times is what makes his stories so effective. I can't get enough of these stories, and I love to see a book full of them.

The Vagabonds #2 (Josh Neufeld & Various, Alternative Comics)

I reviewed issue #1.5 of the Vagabonds back in 2005 for my MOCCA article, and much of that material is in the new issue. The "real" issue is even more attractive than the mini; Neufeld's design sense and aesthetics are subtle and refined. This comic is devoted entirely to Neufeld's collaborations and the nature of collaboration itself. Neufeld is so successful as an illustrator because he never fails to bring out the most in a script he's given but does it without overwhelming the text. This makes him an ideal choice for Harvey Pekar, for example, who usually favors simplicity and directness for his naturalistic storytelling choices.

Neufeld separated the issue into four categories: Confessions (biography), Health & Welfare (odd medical tales), Echoes (formal experiments) and Loss (literal and figurative). In the first section, Neufeld illustrates two stories about Donald Ross written by his son. The first sees his rise as a big-time CEO in New York; the second sees him in Barbados after having given up that life. Both stories involve him ambitiously trying to master his environment, only to find that he was in over his head. Neufeld uses a pleasantly cartoony technique for these stories, verging on bigfoot-style comics.

A highlight of the Health section was a strip that Neufeld wrote about breaking his finger and how alienated from it he became. In a tongue-in-cheek turn, he blames the finger for ruining his career and marriage and ends the story holding a cleaver vowing that "there isn't room enough on this hand for the both of us". The most interesting example from Echoes was Neufeld completely redrawing a page of dialogue from an issue of Superman. Neufeld rethinks a scene featuring Superman returning to the Fortress of Solitude into a scene where a man comes home to his apartment in the midst of winter.

My favorite bit from Loss was "Father McKenzie's Sermon", inspired by the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby". Of course, in the song, Father McKenzie writes the words of a sermon that no one will hear; Neufeld interprets this as a sermon for Rigby's funeral. Neufeld's design on the page was quite clever. We see a shot of his feet, then his gesticulating hands and a bible, then a cross around his neck, then the cross on the coffin. We pan back to see a church and its cemetery, and finally her grave. This strip, and the comics he drew that adapated poetry, show Neufeld's great facility with adapting nearly anything into the language of comics.

Though the issue is interesting in its multiple approaches, experiments and types of story, the best Neufeld stories are those written by Neufeld. His travel stories are reminiscient of Pekar's work in that they look at small moments but significant in unfamiliar places and situations. In this issue, Neufeld stretches the bounds of the unfamiliar as an artist and collaborator, and the reader is treated to a one-man anthology more diverse than many multi-creator anthologies.

Sequart Reprints: Best American Comics 2006

This review was originally published in 2006 at sequart.com
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As anyone who's read my articles on Mome and Hotwire will quickly realize, I have a particular interest in comics anthologies and the effect they can have on comics in general. While there are many inherent problems with anthologies (some avoidable and some not), their inherent potential to both highlight what is great about comics and bring attention to the medium is enormous. While anthologies like Non, Kramer's Ergot and Mome have served either to establish a cutting edge (in the case of the former two) or to bring art comics a step closer to a wider audience (in the case of the latter), neither has quite had the mission, scope or intention of a couple of other anthologies.

The first was McSweeney's #13, a special issue of the literary anthology guest-edited by Chris Ware. Published in 2004, the elaborate hardback issue had three primary foci: reprint classic comics or materials related to same; publish essays on why comics were such an important medium and/or their connections with other arts; and print the best comics of the day. That often included reprinting stories that originally appeared in various publications published by Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly. This book wasn't necessarily aimed at established art-comics fans, but rather the literate and sophisticated reader of McSweeney's who had heard vaguely of these sophisticated comics, but didn't quite know where to turn to next after reading Maus. It was a wider audience than the usual art-comics crowd, but still not exactly what I'd call a general audience.

The second anthology going out to a wider audience is the upcoming The Best American Comics 2006. Published by Houghton-Mifflin, it's the newest series of The Best American... books that began in 1915 with The Best American Short Stories. The series is edited by Anne Elizabeth Moore, a former editor of The Comics Journal and a current editor of the magazine Punk Planet. She went through a number of submissions, minicomics, online comics, anthologies, weekly independent newspapers and various other sources to compile a list for this edition's guest editor, Harvey Pekar.

Pekar is of course one of the unique voices in comics, with his American Splendor series gaining a lot of momentum thanks to the success of the film adaptation. Pekar went to SPX in 2005 and was exposed to a lot of new work. He lamented the fact that so much of it would never be seen by a larger audience and so relished the opportunity to guest-edit this volume.

The result is an anthology that reflects Pekar's interests and biases as a critic and writer. Naturalism dominates the book, either in terms of story or art or both. There are a number of political/journalistic pieces with strips from Joe Sacco (embedded in Iraq), Lloyd Dangle (at the Republican National Convention in NYC), Kim Deitch (interviewing an inmate on death row), and various artists from World War III Illustrated(on an uprising in Nigeria). There's plenty of autobiographical stories/self reflection: Robert Crumb on his childhood, Lynda Barry on the artistic process, Jesse Reklaw meditating on his childhood by recalling each of the cats his family kept, David Heatley's clever series of short strips about his father, an excerpt from John Porcellino about a job he had, Rick Geary recalling a missed opportunity at being seduced and David Lasky talking about driving a bread delivery truck.

Even a lot of the fictional pieces fell into the realm of quotidian, slice-of-life stories: a strip from Alison Bechdel's Dykes To Watch Out For, a intense story of a suicidal woman forced to care for a woman going insane by Justin Hall, a Jonathan Bennett story about a record collector from Mome, an installment from the excellent "Day-By-Day With Hopey" Love and Rockets serial by Jaime Hernandez, an observation of a young man in front of a trophy case by Esther Pearl Watson, a story about a woman dealing with a difficult supervisor by Hob, an excerpt from Alex Robinson's Tricked wherein a man is confronted by a daughter he's never met and an excerpt from Jessica Abel's La Perdida wherein a young woman is confronted regarding her thoughtlessness. Some of the fictional strips were heavily political, like a piece on union-busting from Olivia Schanzer and a first-person account from a monstrous businessman by Tom Hart.

That's twenty-one of thirty stories that all tread on somewhat similar ground. What's really missing from the anthology are comics in the Kramer's Ergot/Non/Fort Thunder school of formal experimentation. That's probably not a huge surprise, given Pekar's interests and preference for fairly straight-ahead representation in the artists he collaborates with. Of course, the fact that trying to sell such avant-garde comics to a general audience is a difficult task possibly may also have had something to do with it. The closest thing to formal experimentation we see in this volume is an excerpt from Rebecca Dart's intriguing Rabbithead, a wordless comic with multiple branching narratives. Strips from Chris Ware and Ivan Brunetti (both done in a stripped-down, minimalist style) were also innovative in terms of layout.

That leaves six other stories that don't otherwise fit into the naturalist groove that I discussed. Joel Priddy's ""Amazing Life of Onion Jack" is one of the few overtly humorous pieces in the volume, a stick-figure story about a superhero who really wishes he were a chef. Kurt Wolfgang's Mome story "Passing Before Life's Very Eyes" is a slice-of-life story with a fantastic bent, while Lilli Carre's tale of Paul Bunyan shows us the downside of being an oversized woodsman. Lastly, there's a weird story of a man running across a dying soldier by Anders Nilsen (another excerpt), a loopy tale by Ben Katchor about a man who designed a window-sill pillow that altered society and lastly a wild Wonder Wart-Hog adventure by underground legend Gilbert Shelton.

The nature of this sort of anthology is to pluck the most interesting stories from other sources, and that certainly includes other anthologies. The Best American Comics 2006 not only used certain aspects of McSweeney's he Best American Cmics #13 as a template for some of its own efforts, it also used many of the same artists and several of the same stories. The pieces from Ware, Heatley, Barry and Deitch were all originally published in McSweeney's, and I don't think it's a coincidence that they're some of the best pieces in this book. In addition, different stories from Sacco, Hernandez, Porcellino, Katchor, Crumb and Brunetti were also published in McSweeney's. Both anthologies concentrated solely on North American comics, which certainly had a lot to do with the commonalities of authors (especially since there's a strong consensus on who the best artists are) and styles. Still, while BAC 2006 went to the same well as McSweeney's on more than one occasion, the pieces from artists like Crumb and Sacco were more compelling than the entries they had in McSweeney's. .

That said, BAC 2006 diverged from the McSweeney's model in concentrating on current comics and only current comics: no extraneous essays and no historical reprints. There's another, perhaps more subtle difference: while McSweeney's only published the work of three women (of 31 modern contributors), the ratio of BAC 2006 was 8/32. I think this speaks to two factors: the increasing number of women producing comics and the editorial influence of Moore. She has always been quite outspoken about the paucity of women represented in significant industry anthologies, and this was clearly a chance to rectify that.

The result is a perfect primer for those curious about alt-comics, or ready to branch out after reading a few of the big names. Some might complain that super-hero comics aren't included here. Pekar addressed this by saying that he read plenty of them, but didn't see any he felt were worth reprinting. That's certainly the bias of Pekar as an editor, and that may change in the future with different guest editors. Still, even the best superhero stories (I might have included an issue of Sleeper) are handicapped by being serialized, too long to easily reprint and often heavily laden by continuity. Personally, I thought that humor comics were given short shrift; not having Michael Kupperman in here is inexplicable. Pekar did say in his introduction that he didn't want to claim that this as a definitive list of all the great comics in this period, just his crack at that concept.

There's a nice balance between big names like Crumb, Shelton, Ware, Barry and Hernandez and younger artists as Carre, Hall and Watson. While most of the art isn't aggressively experimental, there's still a wide range of styles, ranging from the realism of a Sacco to the crude cartoonishness of Watson, Schanzer or Dangle. The fact that so many of the strips have a political point of view is something else that differentiates this book not only from McSweeney's but from a lot of art comics in general. It helps that these points are made by artists as visually distinctive as Tobocman and as sharp-witted as Dangle. Also, though there are a lot of autobiographical stories in the collection, none of them fall into the narcissistic trap that befalls so many cartoonists. Barry and Crumb's pieces are especially sharp.

The other feature I enjoyed was Moore's list of "100 Distinguished Comics from January 2004 to August 2005", also known as "the comics that I liked that Pekar chose not to include". The fact that this list contains work from humorists such as Kupperman and Sam Henderson, along with several contributions from Kramer's Ergot, shows that future guest editors could help this book move in some unusual directions. As it stands, it's perhaps not a bad thing that Pekar, who does some of the most accessible of indy comics, should put together an anthology that is quite accessible to the sophisticated reader not necessarily fluently conversant in the language of comics.

Sequart Reprints: Macedonia

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
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You have to hand it to Harvey Pekar. After the success of his movie and the sales of the American Splendor collections, Ballantine gave him the opportunity to do three new graphic novels. The first was Our Movie Year, which was self-explanatory. It was less a single coherent work than a collection of stories he had already done elsewhere related to the movie, plus some new work. These were classic American Splendor stories, featuring quotidian experiences and observations by Pekar. For his other two books, he went in a very different direction. For Ego and Malice, he told the story of someone he had met who he found fascinating. Harv's done this sort of thing before, because he's always been as interested in telling someone else's story as much as his own. Macedonia, however, is a bit different.

Pekar has always been a working-class intellectual, and politics have always been part of what he's written about. It's no surprise that one of his most frequent collaborators has been Joe Sacco, the preeminent narrative political journalist in comics. Sacco's masterwork is Safe Area Gorazde, about the near-destruction of a mostly Muslim town in Eastern Bosnia. Sacco lived in Gorazde, talked to its residents, and told their story through a series of sharply-created vignettes. The book was not just about war, but about the nature of ethnic conflict and the mania it inspires. When Pekar learned about Roberson, an undergrad at Cal-Berkeley, and the nature of her research, he realized that he could create a story that would be a sort of mirror image of what Sacco did.

Roberson was a Peace Studies major and when she got into an argument about the inevitability of war, she brought up the example of Macedonia. Conditions were in place for an ethnic civil war to erupt in this Balkan state and tensions were certainly high. However, it didn't happen, and Roberson decided to travel there for her thesis project to talk to as many people as possible as to why. Pekar asked if he could see her notes when she returned from her trip, and created a script that Ed Piskor illustrated. I did an interview with Piskor about the Macedonia gig, where he described some of the special challenges involved.

There's a pleasantly rambling nature to the narrative that reflects the fact that Roberson went over to Macedonia not knowing a single person, nor establishing a single contact. This was kind of a crazy way to approach the experience, but it was calculated to a certain extent. After all, her entire thesis revolved around the idea of the rule of law having a primary role in establishing peace between ethnic Macedonians and ethnic Albanians. She wanted to test the accessibility of state organs that anyone should be able to turn to so as to avoid disputes.

Roberson does indeed quickly make contacts, including with a local artist who was leading a disarmament campaign. She makes instant bonds with several deans and professors from Southeastern European University, built for Albanians. Part of the reason why an agreement was reached between the two sides was that an access to education was promised for Albanians, along with a police force that was representative of demographic realities in a given area. Roberson was able to speak to a police trainer about this topic. One reason why Roberson was able to gain this kind of access was that many people she talked to were eager for contact from the outside world. They wanted their stories told, wanted to feel like part of the greater world community rather than an isolated state.

Roberson may be an idealist, but she wasn't starry-eyed in what she saw. Tensions still existed. Disarmament was still a process. Macedonians thought the worst of Albanians, treating them as savages. Albanians, given a leg up in certain areas, didn't exactly turn the other cheek. The possibility of violence was always there. She spoke to plenty of folks on the street about what they saw, in addition to officials who were trying to put the best face on things. Despite those difficulties, one thing was abundantly clear: war would have only made things worse, not better. A quick trip across the border to Kosovo made that abundantly clear.

As a comic, Macedonia has certain bumps. One reason why Sacco is so successful with his projects is that he is the reporter, writer and artist. With Macedonia, the comic is a couple of levels removed from Roberson's actual experience. Pekar boiled down her notes and conversations to a script, and Piskor had to take something that was a long series of talking heads into something interesting to look at that also flowed as a story. In addition to the static nature of the story, Piskor had the additional task of somehow illustrating page after page of background information on an enormously complex conflict. The beginning of the book drags as a result of Roberson giving us the history of the conflict in the form of a conversation with her boyfriend, and Piskor runs with this conversation and shows them driving around, cooking--in motion, giving the reader something to look at.

The lack of structure in the narrative also hurts the flow as a reader. Some kind of arbitrary chapter breaks might have been a good idea or perhaps reorganizing the narrative into a series of vignettes like Safe Area Gorazde. That said, Pekar's skill as a writer really comes to the fore in the last forty or so pages. His ability to bring to life the variety of characters Roberson encounters is Pekar at his best. In particular, the French professor Fabian was hilarious--a nasty cynic who was nonetheless enormously generous. Pekar has always especially excelled at fish-out-of-water stories, and Piskor's non-idealized character designs are a perfect match for the odd people that Roberson meets.

Though Macedonia has some structural and narrative problems, its scope and ambition are both remarkable. After the first forty pages, the book starts to build momentum. In the last forty or fifty pages, the reader is totally swept up into Roberson's experiences and the people she meets, and there's a tangible sadness when she has to leave. The last page sums up the themes of the book, as Heather notes that she left herself vulnerable in trusting others, but the result was meeting dozens of people who were enormously kind and generous to her. She was amazed at the openness and frankness of those she met, something she missed at Cal. Saying, "I'd rather end up bruised than untouched", she sums up not just her own outlook on life, but also the outlook necessary for not just peace, but understanding, to blossom in Macedonia.

New Review @TCJ: Huntington, West Virginia "On The Fly"

Over at The Comics Journal, I've reviewed the posthumous collection of stories by Harvey Pekar (illustrated by Summer McClinton), Huntington, West Virginia "On The Fly".