Comics Review: The Fate of the Artist, Eddie Campbell

This review was first published at The Hooded Utilitarian on March 11, 2011. It was originally a contribution to the site's roundtable on Eddie Campbell's work. For an index of the other roundtable essays, click here.

In memoir comics, it is standard for the author to self-identify exclusively with his or her cartoon representation. The supporting characters are almost always othered in the author’s stories. Eddie Campbell's work is an exception. In his extended autobiographical narratives, he consistently uses the supporting characters as tropes for his aspirations and anxieties. They exist as a prism through which he and the reader can see himself. In “The King Canute Club,” the first extended sequence in his Alec series, one has Danny Grey, the personification of the Campbell/Alec character’s goal of life unencumbered by bourgeois concerns. The “How To Be Artist” sequence gives us Campbell peers such as Alan Moore, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Stephen Bissette as metaphors for both Campbell’s dreams of career glory and his nightmares of failure. With “After the Snooter,” the title character exists as a pointed metaphor for Campbell’s misgivings about his life's direction. Not even Campbell’s cartoon avatar is safe from being divided into multiple entities: “Graffiti Kitchen” features the Campbell figure as both Campbell/Alec and his honking, rampaging id. Campbell contains multitudes, and he puts them on the page for all to see.

Campbell’s representations of himself are unstable, and in the extended Alec narratives, this instability of representation is often accompanied by an instability in the stories' visual fabric. The instability has only increased over time. “The King Canute Club,” the first sequence, features Campbell’s least complicated self-depiction and the most stylistically concrete visualizations. In “Graffiti Kitchen,” its immediate sequel, there is a dramatic shift in the art style; the studied, painterly images give way to a capricious scribbled spontaneity. As I wrote in another essay, the pages often look as if Campbell “wasn’t sure whether word or image would flow from his pen until he applied it to the art board.” The visuals of “How To Be an Artist” are even more radically destabilized; the flow of Campbell’s own drawings is frequently disrupted by the inclusion of panels derived from clippings, xeroxes of photographs, and details from other artists’ work. Reading the Alec material, it often seems that the less centered Campbell’s self-conception is in a story, the more his artwork seems to deconstruct itself. In his autobiographical mode, increased narrative complexity leads him to increasingly refine the refinement out of his art, distilling it first to idea and then to an idea’s external prompts.

Campbell also becomes more playful towards his visuals. His antic side has been apparent in his autobiographical material from the start. “The King Canute Club” finds him trying to mimic the use of absurdist motifs and tropes in Henry Miller’s work, and “Graffiti Kitchen” saw those efforts blossom into the slapstick poetic conceits that are that effort’s most striking achievement. In “How To Be an Artist,” his sense of humor begins to find inspiration in the visual side of his material. He occasionally pokes fun at the appropriation-heavy collage strategy of the visuals, such as when he arbitrarily depicts a couple of incidental characters as Archie Comics’ Betty and Veronica. The wittiest moment in this regard is when he has his cartoon avatar knock on the frame of a panel appropriated from George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, asking if he can come in. (My thanks to Caroline Small for reminding me of this bit in her fine discussion of the “How To Be an Artist” sequence. Click here.) The more integral the visual style becomes to the content of a piece--the more the visuals become the textual content itself--the more ripe they are as a source of humor.

Which brings me to The Fate of the Artist, a wonderful piece that is perhaps the culmination of Campbell’s work in the autobiographical mode. He takes the decentering of his narrative self-depiction about as far as it can go. In addition, the book is even more--much, much more--of a visual hodgepodge than “How To Be an Artist,” although when I call it a hodgepodge, I mean it in the best possible way. It’s a bravura mix of visual and narrative rendering styles, each of which is just about perfect for the narrative and metanarrative moments they’re used to illustrate. Best of all, Campbell is laughing at himself every step of the way. His self-depiction is the butt of the story’s humor, and he highlights and mocks the artifices of his storytelling strategies throughout.

Campbell’s narrative persona is the subject of The Fate of the Artist, but he’s not really a character in it. The story is about his ostensible disappearance, and he’s almost never a player on its main stage. The identification figures for the reader are his family, principally his wife and daughter, and he all but exclusively exists as someone for them to remember and describe. Campbell’s narrative counterpart is generally only shown as he is seen through the eyes of others. The goal in this is to create comic distance, and that gives what turns out to be a portrait-of-the-artist-as-an-aging-crank a hilarity it wouldn’t have otherwise had. It’s difficult to laugh at the absurdity of a character’s behavior if one is called on to identify with him.

The deeper joke of The Fate of the Artist is that we’re not actually seeing Campbell through others’ perspectives. We’re seeing his version of himself--or at least the version he wants to show--presented through the fiction of seeing him through others’ perspectives. But it’s not a joke on the reader; it’s a joke for the reader to share in. Campbell wants the reader to laugh at his narrative counterpart, but he also wants the reader to laugh at the artifice through which he is creating his narrative counterpart. It’s a self-portrait that pretends not to be a self-portrait, while perpetually winking and nudging that it’s really a self-portrait after all.

Campbell constantly calls attention to his construction of the story. He repeatedly shifts through different storytelling media, which has the effect of those media highlighting themselves as media. Parts of the book are prose narrative, others are comics-form flashbacks, while others are fumetti of Campbell’s daughter supposedly discussing him with an off-panel interviewer. The look of the flashback sequences is consistent, but the perspective they reflect certainly isn’t. Most are told from the point of view of Campbell’s wife, but some are third-person, while others are the recollections of his daughter. In at least one instance it isn’t clear whether the reader is seeing something through her eyes or the eyes of her brother. (My only disappointment is that Campbell didn’t give us a flashback from the perspective of the family dog.) Campbell cracks the fictive reality even further by using the visual approach of the flashbacks to depict historical fantasias or to dramatize another author’s story. And he outright shatters it by highlighting that the dramatizations are indeed dramatizations. He informs the reader that the characters are actors playing roles, and in one panel he depicts a scene with a cameraman and boom mikes.

Even the text pages call attention to themselves as constructions. Campbell integrates assorted images into them. The raised capital letters that mark the beginning of a text passage are replaced with photographs of various objects, including a key, a peppermill, and a crushed cracker. Occasional “Campbell-style” cartoons illustrate select bits from the text. Campbell will also play with fonts, font sizes, baselines, typefaces, and the vertical margins for individual lines in order to create emphasis. But he also plays with the typesetting for no apparent reason, and several images seem added for no purpose beyond creating clutter.

The most conspicuous of the clutter-images are the ostensible clippings of old faux newspaper strips, which seem to function as oblique commentaries on the main narrative. However, they almost never cohere with it. The faux strips also lack a clear temporal context. They look like clippings from old newspapers, but one of the continuing strips focuses on the everyday misadventures of Campbell’s daughter, and another often stars the Campbells' dog. The strip that recurs the most is “Honeybee,” which features a bourgeois couple from the Edwardian period (or even earlier), but whose conversations occasionally have a modern-day bent, such as when the husband complains about the ubiquity of the term “soul mate,” or the wife contemplates what underwear she’s going to wear to work the next day. The strips’ only real function is distraction, and while they’re likely to aggravate a reader who prefers tidiness in narrative, others may find their negligible quality relaxing and even look forward to the breathers they offer from the story. The effect is comparable to how some people enjoy commercial breaks on TV. But these strips also serve a narrative purpose: they create a contrast with the story passages that make the latter all the more vivid.

The Fate of the Artist is a brilliantly artful mélange, and it raises the question of where Campbell can take autobiography next. His major works in this mode are all characterized by an increasingly faceted self-depiction. It’s hard to imagine how he can build on the conceit of removing his persona from the story’s foreground and presenting himself through the eyes of others. The major works are also characterized by visuals that call increasing attention to the shaping role of Campbell’s hand, and one can’t see how he can go much further with that, either. But Campbell never seems at a loss when it comes to pushing the envelope. It will be no surprise to someday see The Fate of the Artist as a stepping stone to an even more radical and delightful effort.

Short Take: The Arrival, Shaun Tan

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The 2006 book The Arrival, by Australian cartoonist Shaun Tan, is typical of many ambitious graphic novels. It’s strikingly executed but thinly conceived. The protagonist is a young father who leaves his wife and daughter behind when he travels to another country in search of work. The appearance of him, his family, and their home suggests Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. But his destination brings to mind a New York City as reimagined by the great fantasy cartoonists Winsor McCay and Jim Woodring. Much of what the father encounters in the city is strange, confusing, and at times unnerving. He’s not in danger, though. It’s just an alien environment to which he has yet to become acclimated. The fantasy elements serve to make it alien to the reader as well. Tan’s obvious goal is to evoke the disorientation a traveler to a foreign country encounters, and in so doing elicit a greater sympathy for the immigrant experience. Unfortunately, there’s not much more to the story than this one idea. Possibly to compensate, Tan joins the conceptual slightness to a dense, flashy visual treatment. The story is wordless. It’s told entirely through the drawings, and Tan evokes the characters through their gestures and expressions. The panels are heavily detailed pencil renderings that are clearly intended to recall photographs. There’s no denying that Tan is a skillful draftsman and visual dramatist. But without a story that has the sophistication to complement the richness of the art, his work doesn’t amount to much beyond eye candy. The Arrival is far more a book to look at than to read.

Comics Review: The Photographer, Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier

This review was originally published on The Comics Journal's website on March 1, 2010.

Emmanuel Guibert and Didier Lefèvre’s The Photographer is an outstanding book in many respects. Based on Lefèvre’s experiences as a photographer accompanying a Doctors Without Borders mission in Afghanistan in 1986, it is a fine memoir that doubles as a compelling adventure story. It also offers a richly detailed portrait of life in Afghanistan, a country most have heard a great deal about but don’t have much knowledge of. And finally, it breaks new aesthetic ground as a memoir, as comics, and as photojournalism. The book doesn’t quite reach the brass ring of being a great work, but it is an extraordinarily ambitious and accomplished effort. Comics rarely come much better.

The book begins in July of 1986 with Lefèvre, a 29-year-old French photojournalist, flying from Paris to the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar. He goes there to join a Doctors Without Borders team that is preparing a mission into Afghanistan, and his purpose is to document their efforts. It is a perilous assignment. The journey into the country involves crossing—on foot—several hundred kilometers of terrain, much of it climbing through mountain passes at high altitudes. The natives’ tolerance for foreigners varies, and matters are complicated even further by the civil war between the nation’s Soviet-backed communist government and the anti-Soviet mujahideen spread across the countryside. Danger is everywhere--it can come from the harsh weather and grueling landscape, or from bandits, bullets, or bombs.

Lefèvre is depicted as largely oblivious to the risks. He mainly seems interested in having a good time, and he greatly enjoys himself in Peshawar. However, once the mission gets underway, he doesn’t seem to fully register how dangerous the journey into Afghanistan is. He just takes it for granted that, while the trip may be physically arduous, there’s no real threat to his safety. His lack of concern is shocking. A member of the team’s native escort gets separated from them at one point, even though he eventually finds his way back to the caravan. It’s clear from his expression--the book shows Lefèvre’s photographs of him--that the experience of being lost in the Afghan countryside was absolutely terrifying. Beyond taking his pictures, though, Lefèvre is shown as being largely indifferent to the man. There’s not even any anxiety over the possibility of what happened to the fellow happening to him. He is far more interested in relating how he came to enjoy the special tea the man is brought to help recover.

The scene that includes the photographs of the lost man is where the book’s format comes together for the reader. Lefèvre and cartoonist Emmanuel Guibert had more on their mind when creating The Photographer than simply creating a graphic-novel account of Lefèvre’s experiences. They were also looking to provide an effective narrative showcase for Lefèvre’s pictures. As the book demonstrates, comics provides a better context in which to present the photographs than perhaps any other medium. Interspersing the photographs throughout a prose memoir wouldn’t work half as well. Photography and passages of writing engage the brain in different ways, and they’re too dissimilar to work in conjunction with one another. A reader can look at one or the other, but they can’t be taken in simultaneously. Comics panels are just close enough to photographs for the reader to switch back and forth between the two without it being too jarring. Lefèvre’s story is richer for having the photographs integrated with it in this way, and the photos are all the more powerful for having the story behind them presented so accessibly.

The only complaint one has with the photographs is that there are far too many of them. Guibert and the book’s designer/colorist, Frédéric Lemercier, don’t stop at including individual photographs at key points of the narrative. There are whole sequences that are nothing but photographs, and they disrupt the story’s rhythms. One can justify it in some instances, such as the 2½-page scene in which a little Afghan girl has a burn on her hand treated by one of the mission’s doctors. The book is as much the story of this Doctors Without Borders mission as it is of Lefèvre’s experiences, and this is the work that they do. But some of the extended photographic sequences are of extraneous material, such as the page in which Lefèvre watches an Afghan boy plow a small field with a pair of cattle. Aesthetically, the worst moments are when Guibert and Lemercier present whole sequences from Lefèvre’s proof sheets, such as the scene in which the doctors treat a boy who has had part of his face torn off in an artillery blast. A page made up of 48 separate photographs thuds hard against the eye; one has to force oneself to make one’s way through the sequence.

One of the most powerful scenes is notable for not using photographs at all. It appears during the book’s middle section, in which Lefèvre follows members of the Doctors Without Borders team around as they tend to the sick and injured in the Afghan countryside. After treating a number of people wounded during the bombing of their village, one of the doctors is summoned to a man’s house to examine his daughter, and Lefèvre tags along. The two discover that the little girl is permanently paralyzed, crippled by a fragment of shrapnel no bigger than a grain of rice. Lefèvre, emotionally drained by the sight of the casualties he has been photographing all day, cannot bring himself to take any pictures; he just retreats to a corner of the room and starts crying. He is there to be an impassive observer, but he has reached a point where he cannot keep his emotional distance anymore; he leaves the camera down. The kicker comes after he leaves the house. He encounters another of the doctors, who just videotaped the death of a young boy who was injured in the attack. She did so at the request of his mother, who told her to do so because “people have to know.” Lefèvre realizes that he is not there to indulge himself. He is there to bring the truth of what is happening to the outside world. Photographing these people in their misery is the only way he can bring them justice. Reinvigorated, he rushes back and photographs the girl as she is being carried out of the house. Irony builds upon irony to create an epiphany, and the protagonist discovers his purpose.

When the photographs work with the narrative, they can be devastatingly effective. This is never more the case than in the book’s final third, in which Lefèvre makes his way back to Pakistan. The nonchalance on display on the journey into Afghanistan comes back to bite Lefèvre, and hard. He is arrogant enough to think that he can safely make his way back to Peshawar independently of the Doctors Without Borders team, and when it is announced that they are going to delay their return by a week, he decides to make the trip on his own. He is woefully unprepared for the journey--he can’t even properly load his supply horse--and he is beset upon by mishap after mishap. In his most despairing moment, he finds himself trapped in a mountain pass during a blizzard. He thinks back on the man who got lost during the trip into Afghanistan, and he understands the man’s terror. Thinking he is about to die, he takes a few last pictures. Three photos, printed across two pages, are of his broken-down supply horse, a trope for his ignorance and failure. This is followed by a double-page shot of the desolate though beautiful Afghan landscape, a land that has finally taught Lefèvre to fear and respect it.

Guibert and Lemercier’s visual inventiveness is on dazzling display in the sequence that frames these photographs. In the panels featuring Lefèvre as makes his way up the pass, Lemercier switches to an almost entirely neutral palette, which makes Lefèvre and his horse look as if they are about to be absorbed into the landscape. As the two continue, the color in the panels becomes increasingly monochromatic, until the two figures are finally silhouettes in a field of greenish gray. Splotches of snow, colored with the same greenish gray, break up the black of the figures, making them look as if they are about to disintegrate. After the photographic pages, the silhouette figures resume, and the panels gradually fade to black as Lefèvre falls asleep. When he is woken up and saved by another caravan, the colors return to their normal palette. The images and coloring brilliantly complement the drama of the sequence as its intensity builds and ebbs.

Moments like these feature great artistry, and coupled with the book having a great subject, many may be tempted to call The Photographer a great work. It isn’t. The supporting characters aren’t distinctive personalities, so it needs Lefèvre to be a great character, and he isn’t self-aware enough to highlight the counterpoints needed for that kind of dynamism. The book is at its most compelling when his contradictions and conflicts take center stage, but these appear only intermittently. They aren’t presented and developed throughout the book. There are also an abundance of narrative red herrings. For example, a good deal of attention is paid to Lefèvre learning to properly speak greetings in Dari (the region’s language), but there is no pay-off later in the book. And when one considers this in addition to the erratic and often frustrating use of Lefèvre’s photographs, one recognizes that as impressive as The Photographer is, it could have been a great deal more.

But what it is remains a great deal. Lefèvre’s account of his experience makes for an engaging story. It also provides a rich, detailed, firsthand view of one of the most intriguing and mysterious countries on the planet. And most auspiciously, it demonstrates the narrative viability of combining photographs with comics. This especially opens doors for photojournalists looking to tell stories with their work; they may no longer have to rely on the awkward combination of photographs and prose featured in most photography collections. A cartoonist can provide a more comfortable and immediate narrative context for their work, and make their pictures richer in the process. The Photographer may be the first work in the comics-meets-photojournalism genre; one doubts it will be the last.

Comics Review: Lucille, Ludovic Debeurme

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

This expansive graphic novel about a teenage love affair is an astonishingly executed piece of cartooning.

Ludovic Debeurme is a master cartoon dramatist. In his 2006 graphic novel Lucille, just published in English, he works wonders with a minimalist approach. From a North American perspective, it’s as if he combined the most eloquent aspects of the styles of Chester Brown and John Porcellino. His drawing captures highly specific locales, forceful action, and complex character attitudes with so little fuss that it seems all but miraculous. His visual skill makes this love story between two teenage misfits one of the more vividly realized comics in recent memory.

A more apt title for Lucille would probably be Lucille and Vladimir, as the story is about them both, and neither takes precedence over the other. Lucille is 16 when the story opens, and one immediately sees that she’s plagued with serious self-esteem problems: her classmates treat her callously, boys don’t find her attractive, and her home life offers no edification. She lives alone with her mother, and her mother works night shifts, so the two hardly ever see each other. Her insecurities ultimately manifest themselves as anorexia, which leads to repeated hospitalizations. The hospital is where she first meets Vladimir, a local working-class boy. He’s almost as dejected as she is. His home was never a happy one while growing up, and a family tragedy has resulted in his having to work to support them. When the two meet again after Lucille has returned home, they fall in love. It’s not long before they resolve to run away together. They leave France for Italy, and the second half of the book follows them as their relationship deepens, and they try to build a new life for themselves.

Debeurme's guiding principle seems to be wanting the reader to understand what he shows as fully as possible. Actually, the word “understand” isn’t adequate; he wants the reader to feel everything in the most intense terms. The panel breakdowns are as decompressed as one will find in any manga. It’s the most effective way to create lifelike rhythms on the page. (Lucille runs over 500 pages.) And Debeurme is extraordinarily deft in his manipulation of those rhythms: even with the minimal drawings, he can evoke scenes as diverse as conversations, a bar fight, or a fishing boat caught in a storm as naturalistically as any film director. Debeurme’s interest in maximizing the reader’s feelings of proximity to the story is also reflected in his decision to spend half the book setting up Lucille and Vladimir’s characters before bringing them together. When the story moves to Italy, one doesn’t just see how their anxieties create tensions in their relationship; the reader is on such intimate terms with the two that one feels those tensions along with them.

As affecting as it is, though, Lucille isn’t a particularly profound work. It doesn’t have the conceptual strength of the better efforts in fiction and film, or the very best work in comics. There isn’t really a dynamics of meaning in the story; one’s view of what has come before isn’t really challenged over the course of the reading. Debeurme doesn’t create ambiguities or build conflicts into a higher synthesis, so the material never rises above the level of melodrama. However, while Lucille may not be as rich a work as one may hope, one notes that it is still a very satisfying one. Ludovic Debuerme is a brilliant and conscientious stylist, and that’s quite impressive in its own right.

Comics Review: Please Release, Nate Powell

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Nate Powell's cartooning has a lovely improvisational feel. He is a highly skilled draftsman, with rendering and design skills to match, but one never catchs him exercising those skills for their own sake. One never stops to look at Powell's panels and pages as works of art in themselves; they're completely in service to his narratives, and the exuberance of his visuals carries one along in the manner of a good jazz solo. One never knows quite where he's going, and one suspects he doesn't know, either; all that can be done is to ride the notes and rhythms out to wherever they end up.

The style is beautifully suited to Powell's subject matter. The four stories in Please Release are confessional pieces, and the jazzy visual treatment reinforces the exploring, reflective tone. Powell depicts himself as a nomadic artist and musician who supports himself working as a direct care provider for the developmentally disabled. One sees him grappling with loneliness and dissatisfaction over where life has taken him--he's heading into his late twenties, and he still has yet to settle down in any conventional way--but for all the self-pity of statements like "I'm terrified of existing ... and even more afraid of being forgotten," he remains intensely engaged with life as he lives it, whether it's playing and listening to music, or tackling the challenges involved in the care of the group-home clients with whom he works. The stories shift from melancholy to moments of active engagement to epiphanies of satisfaction in times of extreme doubt, and they're remarkably fluid and all of a piece. One might even call them lyrical.