Short Take: Things Just Get Away from You, Walt Holcombe

This review originally appeared on Pol Culture.

In his collection Things Just Get Away from You, Walt Holcombe combines a penchant for whimsical, low-key adventure fantasy with an elegant and lively cartooning style. He has many hallmarks of a good children’s-comics creator. What he doesn’t have is much self-awareness or a sense of propriety. The opening story, “The King of Persia,” is typical. It starts as a light, antic tale about an ancient king (with a talking camel for a sidekick) who enlists a genie’s help to win the woman of his dreams. Holcombe even sets up a moral about always treating others’ hospitality with respect. What one doesn’t expect is for the story to be peppered with, among other things, suicide, gratuitous violence, and casual sex. These elements are all arbitrary, offhand, and fleeting. Holcombe doesn’t utilize them for overt shock value or any kind of ironic effect. They don't connect to anything deeper. It also doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that these things are discordant with his material and visual style. He’s just blithely sticking inappropriate bits into stories that otherwise seem geared for children. After putting the book down, one is left with the impression that Holcombe needs some perspective on what he's doing. It’s not that he should put aside this material and art style for those of more gravitas. It’s that he needs to recognize the readership for which his approach is most appropriate. There’s pride to be had in producing good material for children. The appeal of Things Just Get Away from You would seem restricted to adults who have failed to grow up.

Comics Review: "The Thing About Madeline," Lilli Carré

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Lilli Carré blossoms from a promising talent to an accomplished cartoonist in this affecting, superbly crafted fantasy about finding fulfillment in one’s life.

Last year, I reviewed Lilli Carré’s The Lagoon, which I found extremely frustrating. Carré was a striking cartooning talent, with an obvious interest in formal experimentation, but the story was largely inscrutable. There was a hermetic feeling to it, as if a good portion of it was still locked up in her head. I had come to the book after reading a number of current comics where the authors had never bothered to give their material any kind of dramatic or poetic shape. In my review of The Lagoon, I unfairly lumped Carré’s work in with those meandering efforts. Unlike the peers of hers in question, she clearly conceived her work in terms of narrative effects. The problem with The Lagoon was that there was something about the story that proved ineffable for her. She gave a sophisticated surface to material that just wasn’t accessible. One was caught between admiration for her obvious sense of craft and annoyance at the solipsistic nature of her content. I read it at a point where my patience with inchoate efforts was at a low ebb, and she became a target for a bit of misguided lashing out.

But two subsequent efforts make her quite the target for praise, and there is nothing misguided about it. “The Carnival,” which I’ll review soon, is probably the single best comics story of the past year. “The Thing About Madeline,” the subject of today’s piece, isn’t quite as accomplished, but nonetheless, it is a finely crafted gem. Everything comes together for Carré. The piece is elegantly structured and paced, with meanings both clear and affecting.

The key moment in “The Thing About Madeline” is when the title character comes home one evening and finds a doppelgänger sleeping in her bed. Up to this point, Carré has methodically constructed a portrait of Madeline as someone who is dissatisfied with life. She has a boring dead-end job, and she spends her off-hours at the local bar getting drunk and singing along with her favorite song on the jukebox. The opportunity is there for a romance with another bar regular, but Madeline is too caught up in her unhappiness to make the connection. The portrait climaxes with the arrival of the doppelgänger, a trope for the intensity of Madeline’s feelings of alienation. She has become so estranged from her life that she is no longer the one living it.

The story then artfully moves from metaphor to irony. In short order, the doppelgänger takes over every aspect of Madeline’s life, but the double finds happiness there. Her morale is high at work, and the bar becomes a place to socialize rather than retreat into oneself. Romance even blossoms with the fellow she hangs out with there. Madeline finds herself literally on the outside looking in. She has become so completely shut out of her life that her acquaintances no longer recognize her. When she and the double finally confront each other, her sense of alienation reaches its apogee: She no longer recognizes herself. Carré uses personification to powerful dramatic effect.

The confrontation scene works as a climax and a second turning point. In the story’s third act, Madeline leaves town and builds a new life elsewhere. Lessons appear to have been learned from the doppelgänger episode; Madeline embraces her new routines and relationships instead of allowing herself to be defeated by them. Carré, though, is too sharp to end her story on such a pat, moralizing note. A few years later, Madeline briefly encounters a person she knew in her old life, and things have changed for him. When she last saw him, he was happy and fulfilled, but now there is an air of dissatisfaction. The story ends with Madeline being stalked by a second figure from earlier in the story, one who appears to be acting out of an obsessive sense of envy. It is a superbly suggestive finale. Carré closes the story on a portentous note, and she challenges the reader’s judgment of Madeline as a character. Madeline’s problem in the story’s first two sections may not have been her attitude. Perhaps her circumstances were inherently demoralizing after all. The ending also lends itself to a supernatural reading at odds with the one I'm presenting here. There’s a feeling of the uncanny in the final moments that cannot be dismissed.

Carré’s presentation of the story is largely excellent. The panels are clear and unostentatiously drawn. She also does a fine job of building the story’s rhythms. The story moves back and forth between expository narration and dialogue. It never feels monotonous, and the shifts in the approach to dramatization never call attention to themselves. The only things that aren’t handled particularly well are the color effects. The scenes featuring Madeline’s old life are rendered in indigo hues, with the ones in her new circumstances presented in a muted orange. The shift is clearly intended to reflect the emotional change in her life, but the meaning is too obvious. The color gray is also used, and the handling of it is confusing. Carré uses it in the outside-looking-in moments, but the feeling she is trying to evoke with it never comes across. But these are niggling flaws, and one respects the effort. It is always better to fall down by trying too much than trying too little. One’s sense of Carré is that she strives to make every element she includes serve a narrative purpose, and overall, “The Thing About Madeline” is a superb example of craft and formal control. She’s a terrific cartoonist.

Comics Review: Exit Wounds, Rutu Modan

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The most impressive aspect of Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds is its evocation of contemporary life in Israel. Modan’s visual style is strongly influenced by Hergé and Tintin--she shares his simple “clear line” approach to rendering, as well as his love of heavily articulated backgrounds--but she has a command of social detail worlds beyond anything seen in his work. She gives every setting in the story a remarkable degree of authenticity. The streets of Tel Aviv, a bus-station cafeteria in Hadera, the apartments of the various characters--these locations and others are precisely and acutely observed. Modan’s storytelling also presents several other fresh details, such as the matter-of-fact, life-goes-on attitude of the characters towards terrorism. And through the conspicuous absence of Palestinian characters and their culture, she draws attention to the ethnic segregation in Israel and the homogeneity it imposes on the Jews who live there. This and the lifelike pacing of the story give Exit Wounds a you-are-there quality that is unusual and fresh.

The two main characters, both Israeli Jews, are Koby, a thirtysomething Tel Aviv cab driver, and Numi, an affluent woman in her early twenties. They meet at the tail-end of Numi’s military service. Numi confronts Koby with the possibility that his father, whom she’d been having an affair with, might have been killed in a suicide bombing in the city of Hadera several weeks earlier. There was an unidentified victim at the scene, and she wants Koby to submit to a DNA test to ascertain whether the body is his father’s. He is resistant to this--he and his father have been estranged for some time--but he eventually agrees and accompanies her to Hadera. A number of complications ensue, Koby and Numi both come to terms with their relationships with Koby’s father, and the two fall in love. Modan provides the set-up and outlines of what looks to be a promising story.

One only wishes that the narrative she develops was worthy of that promise and her considerable cartooning skills. Everything about Exit Wounds is first-rate except the script. The plotting is reasonably deft, but Koby and Numi are unappealing, poorly realized bores. The only time they command interest is when they’re reacting to the story’s twists and turns. Most of the time, though, their behavior falls into a pattern that becomes grindingly familiar as the book goes on. One of the two approaches the other to go along with some idea. The other stubbornly resists at first, only to relent in short order. They then crab at each other until one says or does something the other takes offense at and stalks off. However, they’re soon back together again, and the cycle starts over. There’s no wit or drama in the way these two gripe at each other; the reader is left marking time until a raw nerve inevitably gets hit. The love story is unconvincing; a beach interlude notwithstanding, there’s no sense of rapport between Koby and Numi. One self-absorbed pill falls for another, and for no apparent reason beyond the other being unusually tolerant of the other’s unpleasantness. Modan can’t build any narrative momentum out of their relationship--the story's emotional core--and the book ultimately comes across as a lavishly realized nothing, albeit one with a topical setting.

Exit Wounds, though, has garnered raves throughout the comics industry and the mainstream press, with the characters being treated as a particular highlight of the book. One has to wonder if the book is being praised more for what it isn’t than what it is. In sharp contrast to the stereotypical comic book, the pacing is deliberate as opposed to headlong, the approach to dramatization is understated instead of hyperbolic, and the characters seem rooted in observation rather than stereotypes. A naturalistic tone is unusual for comics, and perhaps that’s what these reviewers are responding to. But naturalism is nothing without dynamism--the various facets of Koby and Numi’s personalities, as well as their relationship, never add up to a whole greater than the sum of the parts. And the most acutely observed characters become hackneyed if they’re put through the same paces over and over again. Exit Wounds, for all of Rutu Modan’s visual prowess, is an eminently forgettable book. It reminds me of the award bait that litters movie theaters in December and January: topical, ambitious, and technically accomplished, but celebrated far more for intentions than achievement. A year or so down the road, no one will remember anything about it.

Comics Review: The Moth or the Flame, Joshua Ray Stephens

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

A prefatory note: I'm personally acquainted with Joshua Ray Stephens. I've also had professional dealings with him, which involved commissions for advertising design work during my time as a book editor in New York. That said, I'm approaching this review the same way I would any other, which is writing down my honest reactions to his book. I hope Joshua can forgive me. He is a nice guy.

The Moth or the Flame takes up the question of exploitive relationships, specifically, who is more at fault? Is it the exploiter, who simply follows his or her rapacious instincts? Or is it the exploited, who, in voluntary situations, sacrifices long-term well-being for short-term happiness? Stephens frames the issue with the story of a sugar-daddy relationship between his two main characters: the wealthy Tempest McGillicutty and a young woman named Tealeaf Rosewallow. Explicitly allegorical, it's a Faust parable at heart, and like most such stories, it's a cautionary tale. The moral is pat: the exploiter is contemptible and perhaps evil, but the exploited is responsible for her doom.

Stephens dresses up his narrative with a number of disparate elements, including absurdist satire, magic-realist surrealism, and children's-story fantasy trappings. However, he doesn't do much to dramatize it. The only dynamic literary aspect is the development of the principal metaphor, a giant black raindrop that signifies the climax of McGillicutty's masturbatory exploitation of others. The characterizations are shallow, with McGillicutty and Tealeaf existing more as ideas than personalities: he's aggressive and predatory, while she's a wide-eyed pleasure-seeker who lives only for the moment. In the most notable Faust story produced in comics, Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder's "Goodman Goes Playboy," the doomed hedonist gradually reveals the depths of his depravity through his interactions with others, including conflicts with jealous friends and his "angel's advocate" Goodman Beaver. But McGillicutty and Tealeaf never challenge each other, and in the instances where they're challenged by others, the scene is either extraneous (as in the office scene between Tealeaf and her friend Violet), or it didactically spells out things that one's already inferred. It's belaboring a point for McGillicutty to tell another character, "I am a hunter. For me this is the only way. We all have our role. You just fulfill yours and allow me to worry about mine." The story is so thinly realized that it often reads like an illustrated summary.

Stephens' visual treatment, though, is so extravagant that the book's narrative weaknesses almost seem beside the point. His style is extremely reminiscent of RAW alumnus Mark Beyer's. The draftsmanship is primitivist, with positive shapes and absented backgrounds obsessively rendered with their own unique patterning. Some may find his art more engaging than Beyer's. The characters are more fluidly drawn, and they're far more emotionally expressive. But Stephens' cartooning certainly resembles Beyer's in its overall effect: one is more compelled to appreciate the panels and pages as works of art in their own right than to treat them as components of a story. The lavish printing of The Moth or the Flame, which includes hardcover binding and signatures of different-colored paper, further promotes the feeling that the book is more of a monograph than a graphic novel.

I did have a great time looking at it, I must say.