Inchoate Thoughts on Asterios Polyp

This is a revised version of an essay that originally appeared on The Hooded Utilitarian on June 6, 2010.

What's startling about Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli’s decade-in-the-making graphic novel, is the degree he appears to glory in his command of artifice. Mazzucchelli’s previous efforts, for all the shifts in styles and genres over the years, had been exemplars of dramatic naturalism. In Daredevil: Born Again and Batman: Year One, his 1980s collaborations with scriptwriter Frank Miller, the gaudy trappings of the superhero genre--the fanciful costumes and violent spectacle--seemed like impositions on the stories. The material comes most to life when it focuses on the mundane dramas of the characters’ lives. Born Again rarely features the hero in costume, and while he’s always central, he is just one character among many in the book’s large ensemble cast. In Batman: Year One, the title character was effectively reduced to a supporting role; the true protagonist was the future police commissioner James Gordon, and the story was driven by his efforts to navigate the city’s corruption. The emphasis on the mundane continued in Mazzucchelli’s major 1990s efforts, such as the comics adaptation of Paul Auster’s novel City of Glass, and his short pieces in Rubber Blanket, Drawn & Quarterly, and other anthologies. Character drama seemed like it was everything to him, and with his command of dramatic nuance, his ability to set scenes, and his capacity for remarkably observant depictions of story locales, he had a uniquely potent arsenal for realizing any story to which he applied himself.

In Asterios Polyp, Mazzucchelli turns his back on virtually everything that defined his previous work. The title character is an academic--an architecture professor--who chucks it all to take up a working-class, small-town existence. The “simple life” (cue the Elton John song) helps him get in touch with his true self and come to terms with his relationship with his ex-wife, with whom he reconciles at the book’s end. The story is glib, trite, and populated with hackneyed characters. There is nothing naturalistic or observed in how they are written. Some characters exist to expound narratives and theses at each other. Others embody some abstract quality or behave in some contrivedly absurd way, such as speaking in malapropisms or spouting Leninist cant. The drawing often looks like it was processed though a computer, with its ersatz quality emphasized by the arbitrary color scheme and the emphasis on yellow and purple hues. The book largely seems to exist as a platform to show off effects. Here’s how lettering and balloon shapes can be used to inflect characterizations. Here’s how color and line can be used to render shifts in emotional tone. Here’s how compositional repetitions can be used to illustrate a character’s mindset. And so on. Mazzucchelli has been teaching comics at the School of Visual Arts for several years now, and one wonders to what extent Asterios Polyp was intended as a textbook in his classes. A reader looking for substance may end up hating the book from one end of its piss-elegant jacket design to the other.

But one can’t entirely dismiss it. Upon reflection, Asterios Polyp is not quite a radical break from the work Mazzucchelli has done before, and it’s hardly an artistic Tourette’s outburst. One can see the book as an expansion on parts of his earlier efforts. The sections given to discussions of binary concepts and other intellectual matters certainly have their roots in the abstract monologues in City of Glass. Those sequences--the most celebrated in the book--were pointedly not attributed to Mazzucchelli. He did the final rendering, but the visual conception and breakdowns were handled by his collaborator, Paul Karasik. It’s only natural to expect him to try his hand at similar scenes of his own. And the conspicuously artificial quality of Asterios Polyp, specifically its use of stock characters, contrived repetitions, and absurdist touches, harkens back to the “The Death of Monsieur Absurde,” the last story in the third (and final) issue of Mazzucchelli’s self-published anthology series, Rubber Blanket. Before reading Asterios Polyp, I considered “Monsieur Absurde” tangential to Mazzucchelli’s œuvre. It may end up deserving reconsideration as one of the most important things he’s done, at least relative to his development. Asterios Polyp, if nothing else, throws an entirely new light on Mazzucchelli’s previous work.

I’m also being unfair when I describe Mazzucchelli’s art in Asterios Polyp as having an ersatz quality to it. I have an instinctive revulsion to computer-generated repetitions in comics, and I can’t help but grit my teeth at the use of Photoshop to change the color of Mazzucchelli’s line and brushwork. However, none of that changes the fact that he is one of the finest draftsmen in the field, and Asterios Polyp may be his best-drawn work to date. The character renderings are packed with nuance. Mazzucchelli’s love of observed detail in settings is also very much on display in his depiction of the characters’ apartments and other interiors. The composer’s apartment in particular is just astounding; Mazzucchelli captures the extreme clutter while keeping the compositions entirely lucid. On top of that, the page design and pacing is nothing less than impeccable throughout—the book is a fast, breezy read. Once one gets used to the color effects, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Asterios Polyp may be an unsurpassed piece of comics eye-candy.

And maybe that’s enough to justify thinking of it as one of the better comics of recent years. Those who love comics extend that sentiment to a lot of lowbrow or children’s material--work that we can’t recommend (or defend) to the less obsessed without a lot of caveats and apologies. At present, I’m pretty fixated on Alex Toth’s Zorro stories and Frank Frazetta’s romance comics, neither of which I could begin to recommend in the way I can with From Hell or Fun Home. One is either entertained by Toth or Frazetta’s consummate visual craftsmanship or one isn’t; the story material certainly isn’t worth bothering with on its own. That’s a generosity that we should consider extending to shallow “literary” comics like Asterios Polyp. It is, after all, one I certainly give to stylistically brilliant highbrow banality like Antonioni’s films after L’avventura or Updike’s fiction outside of the Rabbit novels. There should be no class distinctions in the arts, not even with entertainingly artful junk.

Comics Review: Nine Ways to Disappear, Lilli Carré

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Lilli Carré's elegantly packaged collection of short strips is a rich gathering of allegory and surrealist play.

What sets Lilli Carré apart from the bulk of her peers in contemporary comics is her interest in poetic narrative. The few comics creators who make use of poetic technique tend to rely on it for decorative effects: the metaphors and whatnot enhance the material; they don’t define it. Carré’s stories, by contrast, are invariably designed as allegories. The metaphors are the content. Efforts such as “The Carnival” and "The Thing About Madeline" are not constructed in terms of plot suspense or emotional identifications with the characters; the drama is entirely in how Carré builds her tropes and creates new meanings out of them. She’s not the most rounded storyteller; her all but exclusive emphasis on allegory denies her the range of effect creators such as Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell, and Chris Ware have developed. Her work doesn’t achieve that level of richness. But in a field dominated by trudging literalism and surrealist meandering, Carré’s material is a welcome change of pace. One can’t just read her stories; one also has to think one’s way through them, and that demand is invigorating.

Nine Ways to Disappear, a 2009 collection of short strips, is an enjoyable assortment of allegories and surrealist vignettes. It is ostensibly organized around the motif of disappearance, but it is not a thematic departure from Carré’s other efforts. Disappearance was also central to “The Carnival” and "The Thing About Madeline." The constant of Carré’s protagonists is their propensity towards withdrawal in response to the stresses of life, and the characters of those earlier stories are no exception. And there as well as here, she uses fantasy and bleak humor to render the varieties of alienation she depicts. One almost always appreciates her imagination and wit. Sometimes, as with “Dorado Park,” the most accomplished piece in Nine Ways, her allegories hit potent emotional chords.

“Dorado Park” begins with a harsh satire of the circumstances of workers in our capitalist society. The residents of the park are the victims of “cigar smokers” who “spin them around and leave them disoriented on the grass.” They spend their days looking for shelter or a way out. The tenors of the various tropes are reasonably clear. El Dorado is the mythical city made out of gold, so the park is defined as the place of the mythical happiness money brings. The cigar smokers are the business owners--a rather clichéd trope there--and their victims are the workers they exploit. All the workers can hope for is a way out of that environment, either by finding an independent livelihood or journeying out into the unknown. Carré presents working for others as a demoralizing trap.

The story then introduces a counterpoint: two sisters who live in a nearby house and support themselves with a joke-writing business. It’s a happy contrast, made up of autonomy, a mutually supportive family relationship, and fulfilling work defined by laughter and creativity. But as quickly as Carré sets this divergent situation up, she undermines it. A wedge comes between the sisters in the form of a boyfriend. This begins the funniest section of the story, as Carré presents the analogues for love, romance, and sex through the prism of the unattached sister’s hostile eye. The boyfriend’s romantic leanings are portrayed as taking to the sister “like an overly affectionate cat that wouldn’t leave her lap,” and the sound of sex between the two is described as “wild animals scratching at the door.” This is followed by a hilarious panel of the boyfriend simultaneously attacking and fending off the paramour sister with a chair. In the metaphors that follow, Carré shows the sisters becoming gradually more estranged, until they finally no longer exist to the other. The unattached sister is ultimately forced out of the house. The concluding panel is disturbingly poignant: the unattached sister enters the park, with the accompanying caption reading, “I knew what I was getting into.” The story’s overall tenor is clear enough. A family is a haven, but its members eventually seek fulfillment elsewhere. Those left behind are ultimately forced to find new connections, and the connections fostered by work and career may offer no fulfillment. However, there also may be no choice but to go along, as the road of romantic relationships may prove even lonelier. The allegory of “Dorado Park” is darkly, achingly resonant.

The other allegorical strips are nearly as effective. The most lucid (and probably for many the most enjoyable) is “If I Were a Fish,” which uses the personification of a storm drain to illustrate the idea that no matter how much one has, one always focuses on that which falls beyond one’s grasp. “The Pearl” dramatizes that value is relative; the worth of something is what the possessor projects onto it, and the possessor may have no understanding of what he or she has until it is too late. “The Neighbor” shows how associations, no matter how unique the original circumstances, can follow one throughout life. “Sleepwalking,” which uses the activity of the title as a metaphor for disengagement, is probably the most developed of the stories after “Dorado Park.” The weakest of the strips is “Wide Eyes,” which shows the attractions in a romantic relationship becoming oppressive as they become a metonymy for the relationship’s pressures. Carré tries to end it on an ironic note--she draws an equivalency between the trope for the oppressions and the one for the attractions--but it doesn’t quite come off. Still, no matter how much the ending falters, the piece works well until that point. All of these strips are worth returning to repeatedly; Carré’s tropes are frequently wondrous, and there’s an enduring pleasure in seeing them built into a larger, coherent whole.

As I indicated above, not all of Nine Ways is allegorical in nature. Three of the pieces--“What Am I Going to Do?,” “The Sun,” and “Wait”--are surrealist exercises in metamorphosis effects. “The Wait,” which at the end refers back to “If I Was a Fish,” is probably the most entertaining, although more erudite readers will probably get a kick out of “What Am I Going to Do?” and its allusion to the great minotaur trope of 1930s surrealism. These strips may seem somewhat out of place when considered relative to the narrative density of the other pieces, but they’re spaced out from one another in the collection. If one is reading the book in a single sitting, one may find the lulls they provide refreshing. One may also enjoy their similarity to Carré’s animation efforts; they are designed around the visual breakdown of movement, and as such, they could easily function as storyboards for her films.

However, as dissimilar as these strips are from the allegories, they aren’t discordant in terms of her visual scheme. The work in the book follows a very specific format. The book’s dimensions are square. The panels are all the same size, and there is only one to a page. Each story is given a unique decorative border with which to frame the panels. The blank pages between the stories are patterned, with a similar though distinct design used for the blank pages in the front and end matter. Contrasting (though muted) monochromes are used for the jacket exteriors and interiors. The drawing and frequently dense rendering of the panels is of course superb. The artwork and design choices all come together to make the physical book a quite elegant objet d’art.

In short, Nine Ways to Disappear is a fine addition to Lilli Carré’s groing library of work. It’s enjoyable to look at as well as to read. And the reading is richer than nearly anything else offered in comics today.

Comics Review: Batman & Robin, Book One: Batman Reborn, Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, and Philip Tan

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The first storyline in scriptwriter Grant Morrison's reworking of the Dynamic Duo is probably the most enjoyable superhero tale of the last couple of years, and this includes movies as well as comics.

Given a choice between the current crop of costumed-superhero comics and the movies that feature the characters, one is probably better off going with the movies. As bad as the films have increasingly gotten, they’re still designed to entertain a general audience. Contemporary superhero comics cater to their cult. The narratives are often so bogged down in references to previous storylines that they’re all but incomprehensible. The art is generally impersonal and hideously over-rendered. Taken as cartooning, it is often astonishingly inept. If the narrative baggage from prior episodes hasn’t hopelessly confused the reader, the unfathomable visual storytelling is usually able to finish the job. And don’t get me started on the creepy sexual attitudes that inform most of the writing and drawing.

Batman & Robin, Book One: Batman Reborn, scripted by Grant Morrison, with art by Frank Quitely and Philip Tan, is quite a pleasant surprise. (Quitely illustrates the first of the book's two stories; Tan draws the second.) The book is not only readable, it’s actually entertaining, particularly in Quitely’s half. Morrison starts with a solid premise: Bruce Wayne is dead, and the adult Dick Grayson--better known to most of us as Robin--assumes Batman’s cape and cowl. He is joined by a new Robin, who is Wayne’s 10-year-old son. The basic concept is developed well. Grayson’s conflicts are not only with the criminals the two fight. He also has to deal with his insecurities about living up to the crime-fighting standard set by the elder Wayne. His challenge is not only to prove himself to his own satisfaction, he also has to earn the respect of the police department, who quickly realize he’s not the same Batman, as well as that of Wayne’s son, who constantly complains that his father would have done this or that differently. Frank Quitely's cartooning has a refreshing clarity, and the plot in his storyline is an enjoyably lurid pulp story. The villain creates female accomplices by addicting them to an identity-destroying narcotic. Further, he gets his sadistic jollies by grafting doll-like masks to their faces. It’s up to the heroes to stop him before he holds Gotham City hostage with an aerosol version of the drug. As far as Batman stories go, this is pretty good.

The second story unfortunately isn’t as successful. Philip Tan’s work is a good deal better than that of most superhero cartoonists these days, but his efforts lack the clarity and flow of Quitely’s pages. Morrison’s story also gets bogged down in the problems that undercut the work of most contemporary superhero-comics writers. The new Batman and Robin have to contend with a rival costumed vigilante who isn’t just content to capture criminals; his preference is to kill them as well. It turns out this new vigilante isn’t exactly a new character. He apparently was Robin at some point in between Grayson’s tenure and that of Wayne’s son, which I gather fits in with some Batman stories that go back a couple of decades. Unfotrunately, the more Morrison weaves this older material together with the new, the less one cares. This old-new character is an unpleasant bore, and one wishes it didn’t take so long for him to be sidelined. The villain everyone’s chasing isn’t very inspired, either. He’s called the Flamingo, and he’s such a tired knock-off of the Joker that one sits there wondering why Morrison and Tan didn’t just go with the original.

I have no idea if this series regains its footing with the storylines that appear after the two collected here. Chances are it doesn’t; superhero comics have an even worse record for diminishing returns than series television. But if one has a hankering for contemporary costumed-superhero fare, one isn’t going to do much better than this collection’s first half. If nothing else, it’s an improvement over what the movie people have been doing with the genre over the last couple of years.

Comics Review: Unlovable, Volume 1, Esther Pearl Watson

This review was originally published on The Comics Journal's website on March 3, 2010.

Esther Pearl Watson’s Unlovable is a rude, crude, and frequently hilarious portrait of suburban teenage life in the 1980s. The book’s narrator, Tammy Pierce, is probably the most hapless 15-year-old girl imaginable. Her home life has nothing to offer, her parents are indifferent, and her little brother is an obnoxious brat. She’s overweight and unpopular. The few friends she has only hang out with her out of boredom, and even then she often has to bribe them. Her life is miserable, but she is anything but depressed. Every moment has urgency for her. She’s crazy-giddy when she’s in a good mood, and drama-queen petulant when upset.

Watson makes Tammy comedy gold. Each episode is superbly paced for laughs, and the naturalistic feel of the proceedings keeps them from lapsing into buffoonery. Some of the material, such as the scatological humor, seems more characteristic of middle school than high school, but everything feels rooted in experience. The narrative generally does a fine job of realizing Watson’s main conceit, which is that the book is an actual 15-year-old’s diary, edited and adapted into cartoon form.

The only significant flaw is with Watson’s visual choices. She’s an experienced artist. Her paintings are a gallery mainstay, and she works as an instructor at the Art Center College of Design outside Los Angeles. The cruddy, grotesque look of the art is deliberate. The idea is obviously to emulate the way an actual Tammy would produce it. Unfortunately, few teenage girls draw or doodle like this. They tend to want everything pretty and colorful, and they try to hide technical ineptitude with lots of decoration. This is especially true of someone like Tammy. Watson’s artwork, with its stark compositions, primitivist draftsmanship, and blah-green wash rendering, is something they wouldn’t be caught dead doing. The look of Unlovable owes more to art-school notions of “authenticity” than any fidelity to its subject.

There’s a lot that suggests Watson’s goal was to create an ersatz version of outsider art. This may give the book some highbrow appeal, but it can’t help but repel just about everyone else. For most people, grotesque primitivism is bad art, no matter how deliberate. Many who might enjoy Unlovable will take one look and pass it by. One wishes Watson had kept her aesthetic pretensions in check, because it is a very entertaining book despite them, and one hopes for it to do well.

Comics Review: The Book of Genesis Illustrated, R. Crumb

This is a slightly revised version of an expanded review that was originally published in The Comics Journal #301. The original, unexpanded essay was in published on October 4, 2009 on Pol Culture.

The master cartoonist's long-awaited Biblical adaptation is finally here, and it is a stodgy, repetitive effort--one that suggests the graphic novel is beyond his creative capacities.



Robert Crumb is undeniably one of our greatest cartoonists. Before him, the best comics artists--for example, Winsor McCay, Harvey Kurtzman and Charles M. Schulz--were commercial entertainers before they were anything else. They always produced their work with one eye on the audience. If they had to make a choice between following their muse and alienating their readers, concern for their readers always won out. Crumb was the first to embrace the Romantic ideal of the artist. Following his muse was paramount, with self-expression and art for art’s sake the highest goals. There were no limits on subject matter with Crumb. And he has used his freedom to develop a satirical eye and command of nuance that is unmatched by any of his peers. Each new Crumb strip has been an event for readers for over four decades now.

Ironically, it has always been a challenge to recommend work by him to those unfamiliar with his œuvre. Most people need to get acclimated before being confronted with his more extreme material. There is also the problem of format. Crumb has always embraced the increasingly anachronistic magazine format for comics; he doesn’t like thinking about his work in graphic-novel terms. (He once said the thought of the work involved in producing a book-length effort was enough to make him physically ill.) My usual solution has been to refer people to the Kafka for Beginners book he produced with writer David Zane Mairowitz. The underlying material is familiar to most readers to at least some degree, and Crumb keeps his excesses in check. Most importantly, his earthy, anxious artwork is very much at home with the adaptations of Kafka excerpts, dramatizations of the writer’s life and satirical pokes at Kafka’s contemporary readership. My only reservation in recommending it is that Crumb was perhaps a bit too sympathetic to Kafka’s work. A great adaptation would have had the two’s sensibilities at odds to a degree; it would provide a great reading of both Kafka and Crumb as artists.

The Book of Genesis, when it was announced as a work-in-progress a few years back, was promoted as the magnum opus we have never gotten from Crumb. When considered relative to the Kafka effort, it promised to duplicate that book’s strengths and transcend its shortcomings. Described as a comprehensive adaptation of the Biblical material, the Genesis project would be a book-length effort. The material would make it accessible beyond the coterie of Crumb’s readership. And best of all, it promised the enlightening discords readers didn’t get from Crumb’s handling of Kafka. The thought of Crumb’s trenchantly satirical perspective illuminating this hoariest of ancient texts was irresistible. One hoped for the pot at the end of the artistic rainbow: a rich, defining statement from a great contemporary talent, and a brilliantly irreverent reading of a monolithic cultural touchstone. One anticipated a work that could redefine one's view of both artist and subject. This material has managed it before; just think of John Milton and Paradise Lost.

Well, the book has now been published, and it is a strong reminder of the truism that one should never get one's hopes up in the arts. (I hasten to add that I didn’t anticipate anything as accomplished as Milton.) Anyone expecting an imaginative retelling of the Biblical material, or an inspired effort from Crumb, isn't going to find it here. In his introduction, Crumb writes, "I approached this as a straight illustration job, with no intention to ridicule or make visual jokes." He can say that again. His treatment of the material is grindingly literal-minded. It is barren of any hint of satire, irony or even allegory. In short, it is a plodding, R-rated Classics Illustrated rendering of the Biblical text. Crumb often isn't even in especially good form visually.

Crumb's timidity in imposing his point of view on the material goes beyond eschewing a satirical or other conspicuously re-imaginative approach. He won't even give it his own narrative rhythms. One of the pleasures of Crumb's work is the loose, open pacing he employs; combined with his incomparable eye for detail, it gives his work a lifelike texture that few cartoonists can duplicate. However, in Genesis, he doesn't allow scenes to play out and find their own shape. Instead, he largely adopts the monotonous, illustrated-text approach of Prince Valiant cartoonist Hal Foster. A snippet of exposition is accompanied by a panel that largely repeats the same information. No thought has been given to using the text as a counterpoint to the images. The dialogue scenes aren't much different. Talking heads and indifferently posed figures tediously expound at one another. Crumb's usually acute dramatic sense largely abandons him. He grossly overuses manic-eyed, raised-hair expressions for dramatic emphasis, numbing whatever effect they might have if used more sparingly. The rare, reasonably well-dramatized scene, such as Tamar's seduction of Judah in Chapter 38, isn't enjoyable so much as it is a relief from the rest of book's dramatically repetitive tedium.

The individual drawings aren't especially interesting, either. Crumb's figure drawing is frequently desultory, and his treatment of the character's faces is often hackneyed. He makes an effort to individualize the men's faces, but the refusal to shape the scenes dramatically makes the characters largely indistinguishable from another. In one chapter, he models a trio of brothers after the Three Stooges, and it barely registers. The female characters fare even worse. The most prominent ones, including Eve, Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel, all look like Crumb's Devil Girl. Crumb's vision of God is a retread of the Michelangelo cliché of the stern, robust old man with a long, flowing beard. The one character I was really looking forward to seeing Crumb's treatment of was the Garden of Eden's serpent. It's a letdown; Crumb makes the character an indifferently drawn rehash of one of Wallace Wood or Mark Schultz's lizard people.

The drawing is probably at its most interesting when Crumb models it after the work of one of his idols, Pieter Breughel the Elder. Crumb frequently falls back on Breughel imagery when the text requires him to illustrate the more abstract verses. However, even that wears out its welcome. One can take only so many images of earthy peasants tilling the land, or herding livestock, or sitting down at communal gatherings before the sight has one's eyes sliding off the page.

The overwhelming problem with Genesis is that Crumb doesn't seem to have thought it through as a dramatic piece. The scenes are not played off each other for dramatic effect, and he doesn't imagine the characters as distinct, idiosyncratic personalities whose interactions are greater than the sum of the parts. He just seems to have illustrated each verse, one after the other, without any consideration as to how they might contribute to a larger whole. When one reads the most accomplished graphic novels, such as Maus, Watchmen, or Black Hole, one sees that the authors carefully weigh each moment with an eye on the reading experience of the entire book. It’s the main reason the books are so understated dramatically; it makes the climactic passages all the more effective. At their poetic best, they take an idea, and seeing the need to present it in different terms for the sake of their and the reader’s interest, reimagine it as a trope--a metaphor, an ironic moment or whatnot. As the books develop, they create new tropes out of the previous ones, and one reaches the end with one’s view of the original idea transformed again and again. Compared to these books, Genesis seems creatively lazy. It comes across as hackneyed, and the saddest aspect of it is that it is hackneyed in Crumb’s own terms. His unrelenting dramatic fortissimo makes the entire book feel flat, and he doesn’t build his ideas into tropes--he lets them degenerate into clichés.

Genesis isn’t a slothful effort; producing it took five years of Crumb's life, with the effort apparent in every intensively cross-hatched panel. But it comes across as more of a test of his artistic endurance than an opportunity to expand his creative range. Perhaps he was right to once feel physically ill at the prospect of having to produce a book-length effort. The problem, though, has proved not to be the amount of work that would need completion; it's that he's not up to the creative challenges such a project entails. I should emphasize that there's no shame in being only a master of short pieces, as Crumb most assuredly is. I love Alice Munro and Ernest Hemingway's work, but I've never been that taken with their novels, either.

Comics Review: "The Carnival," Lilli Carré

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

“The Carnival” is an exquisitely wrought piece of melancholy fantasy, and a high point in the blossoming career of Lilli Carré, the most poetic of contemporary North American cartoonists.

Lilli Carré’s “The Carnival” is featured in MOME, Vol. 14: Spring 2009 and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010.

The Chicago-based cartoonist and illustrator Lilli Carré is one of the most exciting and accomplished comics artists working in North America. She combines a fanciful imagination with an interest in quiet emotions, and she pulls it all together through a rigorous devotion to form--especially poetic form. Her stories are invariably melancholy, but her effects are so nimbly achieved that one can’t help but smile in applause. Two of her most notable works, “The Thing About Madeline” and Nine Ways to Disappear, offer superb examples of poetic narrative in comics. But my favorite of her efforts to date is “The Carnival.” It presents her themes of longing, disaffection, and acceptance with the most resonance, and her aesthetic touch has never been more deft or sophisticated.

“The Carnival” opens with Henry, the story’s protagonist, wrapping up the day at the auto dealership he works at as a salesman. Like the title character in “The Thing About Madeline,” he is stuck in a dull, unfulfilling job, and he just seems to be going through life’s motions. His pitch to a prospective customer, “This one’s a little beauty. A diamond in the rough,” sounds like he’s projecting his hopes of himself onto the car he’s trying to move. As the story continues, his salesman line comes to seem less like a voicing of hopes than it does of reassurances. We see why when he arrives home. He lives by himself in a small apartment, beset upon by a nagging landlady, and his only comforts are a pet fish and eating an apple before falling asleep while watching TV. Later that night, his feelings of dissatisfaction overwhelm him, leading him to drive off aimlessly into the night. He eventually checks into a hotel that has a traveling carnival running next door.

Henry is the sort of fellow whom many would look at and say that he just needs to get laid. Carré seems to recognize this about him, but she knows that he doesn’t need sex so much as the opportunity to relax. She gives him a romantic interest, an unnamed free spirit whom he meets when visiting the carnival. The young woman inspires him to loosen up, but he resists his desire for her. At one point, Henry imagines her sitting topless by a pond, her legs dangling in the water, but he fights against idealizing her appearance in his mind’s eye. He concentrates on her body, and he finds her most conspicuous physical aspect is the unsightly pudge around her midriff. It’s as if he’s trying to convince himself of her unattractiveness. Things begin to get physical between them later on, but she sees his anxiety (he’s trembling) and stops. She can tell that sex and its attendant pressures are not what he needs. She appears to recognize that he has to find comfort within himself before he can share it with another.

Fantasy plays a strong role in Carré’s work, and it springs forth most resonantly in her handling of this nameless woman who enters Henry’s life. As the story progresses, Carré increasingly implies that the woman is not a person at all. She has no name, no sense of propriety (she initiates sex with Henry knowing that a young child can and probably will walk in on them), and in the end Carré demonstrates there’s something definitely supernatural about her. But Carré also makes clear that the woman is not a figment of Henry’s imagination (as much as he’d apparently like to think so in the story’s penultimate scene). The only answer that seems to make sense is that she’s a nymph, a spirit of nature who stands apart from society and follows her whims. Carré certainly suggests it visually; her portrayal of the woman in Henry’s pond fantasy recalls images of the water nymphs in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. But Carré never really resolves the question of the woman’s supernatural nature. She’s fond of evoking the uncanny in her stories, and that demands leaving certain things unanswered. What’s most important in the story’s terms is that the woman becomes an effective metaphor for Henry locating peace and calm in his life. The woman does just that on the story’s final full-page panel, and Carré, in the story’s most dazzlingly poetic moment, evokes it by absenting the character from the image altogether.

Moments like the finale in “The Carnival” establish Carré as perhaps the most poetic-minded of contemporary cartoonists, and one of the great pleasures of her work is her facility with creating, developing, and redefining tropes. Her capacity for using them to advance the narrative is especially striking. Throughout “The Carnival” she introduces odd, discordant details--water dripping from the ceiling, or an omnipresent moth flying around a character’s head--and then infuses them with meaning to create a turning point in the story. For example, the dripping water that nags at Henry in his apartment initially seems like a typical annoyance. However, it becomes increasingly (and fantastically) pervasive. It ultimately floods the entire building, leading him to drive off into the night. It’s clearly a metaphor for his dissatisfaction with life. But sometimes the trope isn’t the detail so much as the action the detail prompts. The moth’s presence is initially nothing more than a character idiosyncrasy. But Henry’s impromptu smashing of it against a wall is a synecdoche for his need for control, conformity, and keeping his feet on the ground. However slightly, he is intolerant of things that go against his sense of order. It’s no wonder his nameless, wayward nymph sees this small act of violence and immediately flees; she likely realizes he will ultimately and forcibly shackle her to his world. Nymphs seduce men into their own world. As the ending shows, he can only be seduced into hers through his memories, and only then with her gone from them. These tropes are just a few among many. Even incidental images like a goldfish carry their own reverberations.

Carré’s poetic effects are the richest and most enjoyable aspect of her work--one feels as if one could discuss them forever. However, it’s an injustice not to note the extraordinary elegance of her visuals. She’s always been very economical with them; if an element doesn’t substantially contribute to an effect, she doesn’t include it. The knowledge that everything counts makes the reader look more closely, and the sleekness of Carré’s panel compositions and breakdowns makes it a smooth, gliding effort. She’s not averse to decorative effects, but her rule seems to be that they enhance what’s already there. That’s certainly true of her beautiful color work on “The Carnival.” Blues and oranges are dominant, and the hues are very subtly orchestrated to create a wide range of dissonances; every panel is remarkably vivid. The panels would certainly work in black-and-white, but imagining them without the color is like imagining a symphony stripped of its supporting arrangements. In other words, the soda would still have its flavor, but the fizz would be gone. Lilli Carré’s cartooning has reached the point where she makes everything feel integral; one can’t treasure any of a piece without treasuring all of it. And “The Carnival” is a rare treasure indeed.