Comics Review: Billie Holiday, José Muñoz & Carlos Sampayo

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Billed as “The story of America’s greatest and most tragic jazz singer,” this short graphic novel reads more like a modernist elegy for her. Unfortunately, it is one that remembers her more for the pathos of her life than her music.

It is hard to think of a medium more unsuited to a story treatment of a musical figure than comics. Narrative cartooning isn’t a textual medium so much as a dramatic one. The characters in comic strips and graphic novels have far more in common with the performers in theater and film than they do with writers’ prose descriptions. A cartoonist can show a singer performing, but it is impossible to evoke the tone of the vocals or the cadence of the delivery to the degree it can be done with words. Comics are inherently staccato in their rhythms; they don't have the expressive fluidity words by themselves can provide.

But that hasn’t stopped cartoonists from trying, and some have even succeeded to a degree. One example is Robert Crumb, whose biographical treatments of figures like Charlie Patton strongly evoke the milieu from which the musicians’ work emerged. Another is Bill Sienkiewicz, whose flamboyantly hallucinatory treatment of Jimi Hendrix’s life was an extremely apt analogue to the visionary rock guitarist’s music.

I had hopes for José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo’s short (49-page) Billie Holiday graphic novel, first published in 1991. Muñoz’s flair for noir atmosphere, urban settings, and tellingly grotesque visual characterizations is ideal for the ‘30s and ‘40s New York nightlife in which Holiday came to prominence. His expressionistic genius for dramatizing alienation seemed a natural for evoking the hauntingly spare quality of her singing. Sampayo’s scriptwriting can be erratic, but he provides his collaborator with a suitable springboard more often than not.

Part of what makes Billie Holiday a letdown is that Muñoz isn’t the dominant partner this time out. The art here is extremely reserved. Muñoz’s skill is obvious; his staging, compositions, and orchestration of black and white are immaculate. But the intensity one sees in Joe’s Bar and the later Alack Sinner material is rarely found. The art is elegant rather than expressive; it asks to be admired instead of felt. The singing scenes--Holiday is shown performing “Fine and Mellow” and “Lover Man”--are especially disappointing. They’re little more than a collection of mannered chiaroscuro head shots. Muñoz doesn’t dramatize the script so much as decorate it.

And it is not a good script. Sampayo doesn’t seem particularly interested in Holiday’s life as a singer. His focus is not on Holiday the performer so much as Holiday the victim. One episode after another emphasizes the pathos of her life. We see Holiday the teenage prostitute. (One john tells her, “I got the biggest equipment north o’ Mississippi; you gonna remember me.”) We see the Holiday who suffered horribly abusive lovers, including one who drives her to a remote area, orders her to strip, beats her, and then burns her clothes before stranding her. We see the Holiday who was harassed by police, most notably her infamous arrest on drug charges while on her hospital deathbed. There’s the heroin, the liquor, and the racism. Sampayo has always had an appetite for melodramatic sensationalism, and he uses Holiday’s life to gorge on it.

He tries to be artful about it. The script intersperses the episodes featuring Holiday with present-day (1989) scenes that alternate between Alack Sinner, Muñoz and Sampayo’s recurring private-eye character, and an entertainment journalist who is writing a story about Holiday for the thirtieth anniversary of her death. The journalist is a smug, yuppie ass who has never heard of Holiday before receiving the assignment. Sinner, on the other hand, is haunted by his two encounters with Holiday when she was alive. The first was during his childhood, and the second was as a young police officer. The structure is a basic modernist exercise in building a story through the juxtaposition of perspectives. Sampayo contrasts the person who doesn’t remember Holiday at all with a man who remembers her more than he perhaps should. The two of them are further juxtaposed with Holiday herself. The device offers no insight into anything. It only serves to dampen the garishness of the Holiday scenes and give the book an elegiac tone.

One wonders if the script was originally intended for a television or screen treatment of Holiday’s life. That would explain why the singing scenes are so unimaginatively handled, and why others seem designed for Holiday’s recordings to be used on the soundtrack as a counterpoint to the action. (This is especially the case with her most famous recording, “Strange Fruit.” The book gives the reader a great deal of build-up to the song, but there’s no follow-through.) Oddly enough, it might also explain why the Sinner character is featured. There’s no good reason for him to be used in the role he’s given. An original character would have worked at least as well, and it wouldn’t have seemed arbitrary--the only apparent reason for Sinner’s presence is to create a link between this book and Muñoz and Sampayo’s other work. But whatever the script’s origins, its biggest failing is that it hasn’t made for good comics. Apart from the shallowness of its content, it plays to almost none of the medium’s strengths. If anything, it only highlights the weaknesses. Muñoz does a handsome job of illustrating it, but for a reader, that shouldn’t be enough.

Note: The book’s back cover features a quote from jazz critic Stanley Crouch’s afterword that appears to be a testimonial. This is misleading. The “Billie Holiday” referred to in the quote is the singer, not the book. Crouch’s afterword is an essay reflecting on Holiday’s life and legacy. There is no mention of Muñoz and Sampayo’s story anywhere in it.

Comics Review: Big Numbers 3, Alan Moore & Bill Sienkiewicz

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

A bootleg version of the third chapter of the legendary unfinished graphic novel has surfaced--and leaves one even more wistful over the promise of what might have been.

Big Numbers 3 has never been published in print format. Jpegs of the "bootleg" version can be seen by clicking here.

Bill Sienkiewicz has written an essay about Big Numbers, published here. In it, he describes the demanding and ultimately onerous process for creating the art in the first two issues, as well as his decision to ultimately walk away from the series. His reasons were far more complicated than what I indicate below. He also states that the discordant appearance of the third issue's artwork was entirely his doing. The art was drawn on Craftint illustration board, which explains the presence of mechanical tone. Please read the essay below with this in mind.

The unfinished works of exceptional artists always hold a special fascination for their audiences. If one is captivated by what is there, one can’t help but wonder about the glory of what didn’t see completion. Michelangelo’s Tomb of Pope Julius II, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Charles Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood--these are but some of the treasures that were never fully realized. In the book Beyond Life, the fantasy writer James Branch Cabell put forward the idea of a library “contain[ing] the cream of unwritten books--the masterpieces that were planned and never carried through.” Cabell’s imaginary library is one that any lover of the arts would revel in visiting.

The prize of that library’s comics shelves would undoubtedly be Big Numbers, Alan Moore< and Bill Sienkiewicz’s unfinished graphic novel from the early 1990s. Moore and Sienkiewicz were arguably the most accomplished talents working in adventure comics in the 1980s. Moore’s scriptwriting on books like Watchmen showed an insight, imagination, and command of narrative craft that could hold its own with the best that contemporary film and prose fiction had to offer. To paraphrase one reviewer, Moore brought adventure comics as close as they would ever get to literature, and he came closer than anyone could have guessed. As for Sienkiewicz, he had evolved from an attractive though derivative illustrator to the most visually audacious cartoonist working. In Elektra: Assassin and Daredevil: Love and War, both scripted by Frank Miller, he brought the Neo-Expressionist aesthetic to adventure comics. Eclecticism reigned, and whatever style or medium he considered most effective in rendering a scene was what was used. A collaboration between these two promised to be a spectacular piece of work.

The premise of Big Numbers only raised expectations. Using the tenets of chaos theory as a guide, it would dramatize the impact of a U. S.-style shopping mall being built in a British Midlands community. The book was to be modeled on literary fiction. The fantasy and adventure trappings of Moore and Sienkiewicz’s previous work would not be present. It was hard to escape the impression that the authors saw their previous efforts as part of an artistic stage they had outgrown. This statement on modern life was part of a new, more mature phase in their work. Judging from Moore’s statements in interviews, he saw the projected 500-page work as his magnum opus.

Two installments encompassing 80 pages were published in 1990. Moore introduced readers to a wide range of characters in a series of deftly written scenes. The scripting was frequently humorous and melancholy all at once. Sienkiewicz dramatized Moore’s script in a nuanced, elegantly naturalistic style that largely relied on subtly toned pencil renderings. There was no sensationalism in Moore’s scripting and minimal hyperbole in Sienkiewicz’s art. This was a work of literary fiction conceived in comics form, and one couldn’t wait to see how it would turn out.

No further installments were published. Sienkiewicz, who reportedly felt overwhelmed and constricted by the massive detail in Moore’s scripts, lost interest in the project and abandoned it. Al Columbia, who assisted Sienkiewicz on the first two installments, was hired to take over, but he lost interest as well. It is believed that he destroyed the pages he completed. Sienkiewicz did finish the art for the third installment, but after Columbia gave up on the book, the decision was made not to publish it. In the years since, ten random, unlettered pages from the third issue were printed in a couple of magazines, and Moore’s script for it was published online. But despite its availability, the prospect of looking at the disparate, incomplete material for the third issue was off-putting. It seemed like eating a dish by consuming the ingredients separately, with a number of them missing or in the wrong amounts.

Bill Sienkiewicz's original, unlettered page 12 for Big Numbers 3.

But this past March, the complete and lettered third installment showed up on the Internet. The pages were sold to Moore scholar Pádraig Ó Méalóid, and with Moore’s permission, this “bootleg” version of Big Numbers 3 was posted on livejournal.com. The presentation is not ideal. Sienkiewicz’s rich pencil rendering is covered with mechanical tone, and the pages’ appearance suggests that they began as faxed proofs of the original art. But as cheesy as they look, the pages are readable. The sauce may be a supermarket-shelf generic instead of gourmet, but the food underneath is still first-rate. Sienkiewicz’s intentions for the art are apparent, and one finds Moore’s narrative becoming increasingly sophisticated. Big Numbers will never see completion, but the achievement of this third installment is impressive, and it is easily one of the key comics of the year.

The "bootleg" lettered version of page 12.

Moore maintains the easygoing pace seen in the first two chapters. He and Sienkiewicz again invite the reader to relax with the characters, and the nuanced understatement of the panels, despite their unfortunate surface appearance, still compels the reader to lose oneself in them. The craft on display in the third installment is just as remarkable as in the first two. The detailed visuals reinforce the languorous rhythms, but Moore never falls into the trap of letting the scenes meander on aimlessly. Every one is structured to end on a pointedly ironic note. The structure and detail in the scenes play off each other wonderfully, and one again finds oneself caught up in the lives of the numerous characters.

The third installment remains guided by the view of human interaction that informed the scenes in the first two chapters. Every person is regarded as an idiosyncratic entity, with those idiosyncrasies finding expression in routines and behavioral patterns. Alienation, which defines virtually every relationship Moore depicts to some degree, results from those patterns meeting, coming into conflict with each other, and creating tension. People then either retreat from one another, or they fall back on routines intended to bring the tension level down, such as making jokes or following through on courtesies. Moore apparently sees behavioral constants as the means through which people impose order on the uncertainty of their lives.

But Moore doesn’t become complacent in his depiction of the characters. The third chapter highlights that a key aspect of people’s dealings with one another is reductionism. We cope with our experience of other people--particularly in new encounters and peripheral relationships--by reducing each other to stereotypes. In keeping with Big Numbers’ roots in mathematical theory, one might say that people respond to complex input by simplifying it into a more easily processed form. This has its obvious bad points and its less obvious good ones. The bad is that it leads to prejudice and bigotry. The good is that it allows for more pointed and confident interactions with each other.

The chapter is at its most enjoyable when Moore emphasizes the absurdity that reductionism creates. A recurring scene features a young welfare clerk sitting at her vegetative husband’s hospital bedside: she's good-naturedly--although haplessly--trying to fill out a shopping-mall marketing survey on his behalf. The mall’s American personnel, including its architect, managers, and marketing supervisor, are shown making complete asses of themselves while trying to ingratiate themselves with the Midlands locals. All they do is repeat one boorish stereotype of British people after another. The marketing supervisor in particular is so obliviously obnoxious in his prejudices that every scene featuring him is a comedic gem. One also sees some sharp satiric ideas from Moore, such as the role-playing game the architect’s teenage children are product-testing. It’s called “Real Life,” and the first three things the kids determine in setting up the game characters are their race, gender, and economic class.

Nearly everything in the chapter emphasizes the process of reductionism found in contemporary life. There are the marketing surveys and canvassers that nearly every character is confronted with. The goal is reduce each of them to a marketing profile. People are presented to the public through photographs. A local author participates in the effort to turn her life into column inches for a local newspaper. That same writer is hard at work on a novel, another distillation of life into the two dimensions of the printed page. But reductionism is difficult for her. She writes of a character, “It was very hard to sum her up,” and feels blocked.

The chapter’s most memorable scene depicts a teenage boy explaining the chaos-theory concept of two-and-a-half dimensions to his depressed father. A piece of paper is two dimensions, and a ball is three. However, if one crumples the paper into a ball, it’s no longer a two-dimensional object, but it’s not quite a three-dimensional one, either. The father is intrigued, and the boy describes the second-and-a half dimension as “like a new planet” and a place to go on holiday. The crumpled paper--the image is used for the chapter’s splash page--is a metaphor for a new way of thinking about the way we relate to others. It illustrates the possibility of a middle ground between the overwhelming input of human interaction and the reductionist approach people rely on to manage it. Judging from this scene, happiness in dealing with others may be found in a synthesis between the facile stereotyping perspective people rely on and an impossible all-encompassing one. Moore's metaphor suggests that there may be a way beyond the alienation that defines contemporary life.

One will never see how Moore might have expanded on that idea. Judging from his other work, it’s impossible to believe he had done more than just scratch its surface. The opening chapters of his From Hell and Watchmen are compelling, but no one could guess those works’ ultimate richness from those chapters alone. The same would have been all but undoubtedly true of Big Numbers. The third chapter brings a fuller understanding of what was lost by the failure to complete more than a quarter of the book. The failure is beyond a disappointment; it’s about as close to an artistic tragedy as one can imagine. But even so, it does not overwhelm the pleasure of going over the 120 completed pages again and again. Even in truncated (and partially adulterated) form, they are dazzling in their wit, craft, and artistry. The knowledge that this beautifully realized and possibly very wise work will never see completion makes Big Numbers perhaps the most bittersweet effort comics will ever know.

Comics Review: Miracleman: The Golden Age [Book 4], Neil Gaiman & Mark Buckingham

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Miracleman was Alan Moore's first major work, and it features the basic approach to story material that defines his style. He identifies the central discourses that inform a concept, and he then reconstructs the concept in ways that critique the original discourses and offer new resonances. In Miracleman, he recognized that an aspect of a superhero's appeal is that such a character speaks to a desire for divine intervention. On some level, people hope for a god to resolve the conflicts and injustices of the world. Moore crafted the story's conclusion to play off this. He had Miracleman abandon all connection to his earthbound life and assume the role of a god. The character took over the world's reins of power, reordered human society, and brought about a utopia with no material or psychological wants. Moore had reimagined the concept of a superhero as divine agent probably about as much as it could be done. Neil Gaiman, his successor on the strip, appeared to have nowhere to go.

Gaiman's response to the challenge was probably the only reasonable one. He didn't try to build on Moore's ideas, and he certainly didn't rehash them. Miracleman: The Golden Age, illustrated by Mark Buckingham, takes an approach to Moore's material that is best described as tangential. It borrows the milieu Moore created, but the characters and story material are all but entirely Gaiman's. The book is a collection of sketches and short stories dealing with the lives of everyday people in Miracleman's utopian world, and unfortunately, most of it isn't very good.

There are some highlights. The best strip in the collection, "Spy Story," is told from the point of view of an erstwhile British spy whose mind is so caught up in the paranoia and suspicion of intrigue that it's driven her mad. It's a sharp, well-crafted piece that builds tension by creating a counterpoint between the reader's recognition of the character's irrationality and one's concern that her terror is justified. Gaiman develops the suspense to a fever pitch, and he resolves the story with a clever anticlimax. "Trends" is enjoyable as well, although it isn't so much a story as an entertaining scene of oneupmanship and flirtation among a group of teens. But the rest of the stories are quite dreary--one pointless study in alienation or self-absorption after another.

The major problem is Gaiman seems to think that once he's struck a tone his job is done. It's not enough for a story to be somber. Unless there's some dynamic at work in the narrative and the characterizations, it isn't going to carry much resonance or interest. Gaiman often tries to end the stories on an epiphanic note, but he lurches into the concluding insights about the characters and situations, and they just aren't that interesting. In fact, they're often quite banal, such as a woman finding solace in a children's-book fantasy while her family is falling apart, or an emotionally and intellectually vapid artist coming to the realization that a remarkably disagreeable acquaintance can't stand his company.

Gaiman tries his hand at a faux-confessional narrative in the poorly-titled "Screaming," but he can't make it work, largely because his protagonist isn't idiosyncratic enough to be engaging. The only narrative tension comes from the context: the main character relates parts of his life story to the girl he's just lost his virginity to. But he's quite oblivious to her, and Gaiman doesn't seem to realize how boorish he is. I kept waiting for the girl to get fed up with his self-absorption and leave. (I was disappointed.) Gaiman's relatively eccentric protagonists also don't work very well. The main character of "Skin Deep" is a recluse whose obsession with physical beauty blocks his ability to relate to women emotionally. One waits for him to set his attitude aside and learn to love--it's an obvious conclusion. But all he ends up doing is reconciling himself to a dull, loveless relationship with a physically plain woman. One doesn't know why one should care about this fellow, and I don't think Gaiman knows either. He doesn't bother to suitably craft his ideas.

The weaker examples of Gaiman's work here aren't entirely devoid of interest. He has a good ear for dialogue, and he knows how to pace a story effectively. He also has a good partner in illustrator Mark Buckingham, who often particularizes the styles in the stories. The look of "Trends," which recalls the work of Jaime Hernandez, is perfect for the piece, and the Xerox-abstracted photorealism of "Spy Story" heightens that strip's noirish, nightmarish tone. Buckingham's most compelling work is featured in "Notes from the Underground," where he makes dynamic use of a variety of artistic styles, including German Expressionist woodcuts and most spectacularly, the appropriation-repetition approach of Andy Warhol. He's a strong illustrator, and his versatility shines throughout.

The book's better aspects aside, though, I can't help but feel indifferent to this material being kept out of print for legal reasons. It's infuriating for Moore's Miracleman work to be forcibly consigned to the pit of the collector's market--it's an influential and landmark work in a major genre of popular narrative. But Gaiman's efforts are poorly developed for the most part, and even the stronger pieces are so irrelevant to the strip's core concepts that they feel like they've been shoehorned in. The legal mess involving Miracleman's ownership has kept a lot of interested readers from seeing this book, but at least they can take some consolation in that they're not missing much.