Review: Kill My Mother: A Graphic Novel

Kill My Mother: A Graphic Novel by Jules Feiffer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Nobody draws like Jules Feiffer. I offer that, initially, as simple fact rather than evaluation. You can recognize his drawings instantly, the loose, flying lines and the sense of movement distinguish his work from every other “political cartoonist” (he was never quite that), humorist (again, not quite his bag), or illustrator I can think of. When he gives us a drawing, he does something no one else seems quite to be doing.

I know his work best, like most people I imagine, from his Village Voice years, and I think of his quintessential work as the “dance for spring” strips, where a girl moves from one dancer’s pose to another talking about some of the good and troubling things of the moment. They’re great to look at, and they seem perfectly representative of their moments.

So here is Feiffer trying something different. Like Will Eisner – or less impressively Joe Kubert – he’s a life-long cartoonist moving to a late-life graphic novel statement, one drawn from the world of his childhood. (Maybe not entirely by coincidence as well, all three of those are Jewish cartoonists.)

This story is tangled and dark. We get a dead husband and a woman who has to take a job as secretary and sometime-date to a boozy, thuggish private eye. We get a girl so angry at her mother that she determines to “kill” her by shoplifting and shocking her propriety. We get a mysterious older woman who shows up and is often unable to speak. And then, after a break, we resume the stories in the Pacific front of World War II.

Individual strands of the story are compelling. In impressive noir fashion, none of these characters is innocent or pure. Each has reasons for us to criticize her, and each is motivated by dark impulses.

The big trouble is that it’s hard to keep the story lines separate. Because Feiffer is so good at movement, his characterization suffers. I confess, I still can’t tell two of the main characters apart: one is intent on shocking her mother, and another is worried that the hit radio show she’s produced – based loosely on her friendship with Artie as a boy – may get undone if the now grown-up Artie tries to sue. Still another is determined to see that her lover, dancing ex-boxer Eddie Longo, makes it big in Hollywood. Of those three, two are the same. I think it’s the first two, but I can’t be sure because Feiffer’s lines move so dramatically that all of his young women look like one another.

There’s a lot to admire here, and I think I will likely take a stab at the sequel, Cousin Joseph, since it seems to venture into the Jewish gangster world, but it’s also frustrating to find so little editorial help in distinguishing the characters. This is Feiffer’s art, and I admire it enough to want it as he thinks he ought to deliver it, but how hard would it have been to include a “cast of characters” page, one where we could see clear drawings of the characters and get capsule descriptions of each?

I suspect it’s easier to get through this without my confusion if you read it straight through. This has been my several pages a night bedside reading, though, so I’ve had to get reacquainted with characters over a more extended time. My bad, perhaps, but the work seems as if it ought to be accessible even spread out.

Anyway, there’s enough going on here, enough to make it stand out from what so many others are doing, that I urge you at least to pick it up at a bookstore and see how different the look and feel is. If Feiffer can manage to slow things down just a little – if he can more effectively distinguish one character from another – then I think the second and third parts of the promised trilogy could really be something.


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Review: The Accidental Alchemist

The Accidental Alchemist by Gigi Pandian
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

J.K. Rowling makes it look so easy: come up with a nice, broad premise, people it with intriguing characters, and let the narrative carry you away.

Pandian starts out with a fun-sounding premise – this time it’s a world of secret alchemists living among the rest of us – and has a nice start with characters when she invents a French-inflected gourmet-cooking gargoyle who’s slowly turning back to stone. She even writes well at times; the opening chapters open with a nice crispness and get us into the story without any tedious description of background. It moves.

But…there’s a next wave of challenges that emerge when you’re trying to do this stuff. Rowling’s real genius comes in her ability to invent such a world and then fully people it. That is, she doesn’t just give us characters; she gives us characters who pursue their own stories off stage. As Harry grows and experiences things, they do too. The others aren’t props. They’re characters living their own stories in this magical world and then finding those stories intersecting with Harry’s.

That’s the part that proves tougher for Pandian. Our protagonist, Zoe, is 300 years old and a past-mistress of alchemy. She’s discovered the secret of eternal life and, well, we mostly just fast-forward 250 years. There’s a back story that emerges slowly – a dead brother, a dead lover – but it’s tangential and feels like a glimpse of coming attractions more than especially relevant to this story.

And this story seems mostly superimposed on the magical world beneath it. A handyman is murdered when he arrives to do work on Zoe’s new house. This is generally a sweet, cozy, toned story. A murder! On her doorstep! Yeah, it’s just sort of there. A darker novel might get away with that, but this is a woman who takes in a 14 year old neighbor. The fact of a murder ought to matter more, but it’s mostly just a convenience of the plot. It doesn’t fit with the tone, and it doesn’t seem necessary.

As the novel moves forward, the fantasy elements of the story lose their technicolor and turn to gray. They become useful facts in the quest to solve this “cozy” murder mystery rather than a real and meaningful change to the way we ought to see existence. We get suspects, and then our alchemist, gargoyle, and teenager use their respective talents to clear or convict them. It deteriorates from a glimpse at a brand new way of thinking about the world (as one where hidden knowledge has produced a caste of near-eternal humans and exotic creatures) to a Miss-Marple-with-mercury.

This is the first in a series of such “mysteries, and, while I certainly envy Pandian that sort of a contract and security as a writer, I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for her, too. She’s a better writer than this concept; I can feel that. She must have learned a lot from writing this – which has its occasional charms – but now, rather than develop a whole new story that might allow her to avoid the pitfalls she’s hardwired into her world (a world where we need fresh crimes to move the story forward but where the tone doesn’t accommodate them) she has to keep working in it.

There’s something here, but not enough. It’s too bad Pandian won’t get the chance for a long time to start over with a blank canvas, and maybe a new narrative that can carry us away rather than take us back in circles to where we started.


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Review: Criminal, Vol. 2: Lawless

Criminal, Vol. 2: Lawless by Ed Brubaker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was so pleased with Brubaker and Phillips’s Coward that I rushed out to get this one. I liked the idea of a bed-time “classic noir film” told entirely in comic book form.

If not for that enthusiasm, I might be gushing about this one. It does have a solid story, and Philips’s illustrations work just as well. In fact, when Leo, Coward’s protagonist, makes a cameo here, it feels a bit like seeing a favorite actor in a new movie.

This story is a little thinner than the last, though. Lawless is simply too tough, too canny, and his hunger for revenge is fairly one-dimensional next to what he might have been.

It’s not a put-down to say this reminds me a little of the Marvin chapters of Frank Miller’s Sin City, but Criminal (this series) feels as it should be more nuanced, less over-the-top than Marv or Sin City. (And, perhaps by coincidence, Miller writes the introduction to this volume.) Sin City is a comic book brilliantly blown up to the big screen. Criminal is old school noir rendered in pen and ink.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see the web of interconnection grew here, and I imagine future Criminal stories will call on some of these same stories and have at least a scene or two in the Undertow Bar.

I imagine the third of these is still pretty solid – as this one is – but I think it’s become less likely that this will turn out to be a whole succession of riveting stories. Solid and good is not bad; it’s just a bit of a let-down after such a strong first volume.


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Review: Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories

Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories by H.P. Lovecraft
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I understand that, in some quarters, these works have become canonical. Lovecraft stands like a kind of Raymond Chandler or J.R.R. Tolkien, an inventor of a genre, what we now call ‘horror.’ And I understand as well that Chandler and Tolkien are also highly stylized, that a lot of readers come to them and say, “Is this all there is?”

But, seriously, is this all there is?

These stories are laughably bad. This is, at best, second-rate Poe, and I have a lower opinion of the original, first-rate Poe than most.

For starters, Lovecraft is a lazy craftsman. These sentences are larded with adjectives. Take away his favorite obscure ones – eldritch, stygian, cyclopedian – and replace them with their essential synonym, “scary,” and you have very little.

Then the plots themselves are clumsy and unfinished. I do like the idea of getting to see Cthulu from the perspective of several different dreamers. Maybe there’d have been something to it if Lovecraft had foreseen the postmodern narrative and managed to make a consciousness of storytelling part of the narrative itself. Instead, as with most of the others here, we have a narrator who, conveniently, goes mad or kills himself just after finishing. Cthulu is out there, tentacle-faced and fearsome (or should I say tentacle-faced and eldritch) and we’re supposed to close the book, go to sleep, and have nightmares about him.

The whole effect comes down to a cheap horror movie stunt: let us catch only a glimpse, only a sense of the shadow of what’s out there. Then let us live in fear of what it might be. I find it a cynical form of narration, and a cynical aesthetic move.

Anyway, all that has made me wonder about the parallels between the horror genre in general and heavy metal music. Each is probably the genre I least appreciate – one in literature and one in music. Friends tell me Metallica is great, and I do recognize the sophistication of their work. Still, I hear mostly just noise and anger, a noise that seems intended to bully me into submission, and an anger that seems to want to enlist me in causes I don’t share.

And maybe it’s true that Stephen King is the analogue of Led Zeppelin, each the most successful out of the genre. Each supposedly competent in ways I can only distantly see. And each spawning admirers who fall far short.

If all that’s true, if horror is a genre predicated on an aesthetic that troubles me from the start, fine. I’ll leave it to others without judgement.

Except, Lovecraft. Really? I think his analogue may be Slade.

I have gone with two stars, the second coming to acknowledge the influence and for the sheer stupid ambition of the work.


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Review: Criminal, Vol. 1: Coward

Criminal, Vol. 1: Coward by Ed Brubaker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have sometimes wondered why, in an era when it ought to be inexpensive to make classic B-movie style films, we don’t have serious film-makers doing riffs on classic 1950s noir films. If any cinema was ever cheaply made but artistically fulfilling, that was it.

I do know, of course, that a lot of our best film-makers began their careers in similar ways. Scorsese started with Mean Streets. The Coen Brothers started with Blood Simple. Tarantino, if always bending the rules, started with Reservoir Dogs. All those are films that riff on classic noir. So why aren’t there more?

I can’t answer that question, but I think Brubaker and Edwards are asking it too. They want to know where the good, taut stories, the stories that happen in the shadows of noir, have gone. And, not finding an answer, they’ve written their own. This is a classic noir film. It just happens to be a comic book.

Leo is called a “coward” because, though he grew up in a world of grifters and heist-men, he famously runs away from conflict. He knows his way around a “score” better than anyone, but he plays it all modestly. He’d rather take care of his foster father Ivan, a guy whose onset dementia doesn’t keep him from picking pockets whenever they go out together, than try to hit it big. He lives by a careful set of rules: always have a second way out, never work with someone you don’t already trust.

Of course, he breaks those rules for a big job that goes sour. You can see that conflict coming from the start, but that doesn’t diminish the skill of the story-telling. What’s striking is that Leo emerges as a character with real depth. He feels, in Phillips’s illustrations, like a legit actor working through a range of fears. Something similar happens with Greta, the could-be stereotype sidekick beauty, who’s more interesting for the conflict she feels as a recovering junkie and the mother of a young girl.

The twists are real throughout, almost never forced. [Minor SPOILER ALERT: The eventual revelation that Leo isn’t scared of getting hurt but rather scared of the capacity he has for hurting others come across as a real payoff, and it sets up the inevitable bloody shoot-out at the end.]

I have to take one star off for the late and gratuitous introduction of the old friend who just happens to work in Internal Affairs and is in the perfect position to help him with the corrupt cops he’s encountered, but that’s a small blemish.

I got the next in the series even before I’d quite finished this one. If the others in the Criminal book are as good as this one (and the Brubaker and Phillips of Fatale – another series of theirs I have very much enjoyed) then I’ve got a whole film festival to look forward to, and it’s all done in pen and ink.


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Review: All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read this one as a kind of expiation for my having read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August last week. There were parts I admired about that book – above all her clean prose and her ability to recover a lost socio-political context – but something troubled me. I knew that stories of kings’ or emperors’ piques, or generals’ ‘wheels’ and ‘advances,’ didn’t tell all the war – certainly not the important parts of the war – and I felt I owed something to that vast sea of suffering we call World War I.

Now that I’ve read this – which is every bit the masterpiece its reputation gives it – I’m ready to declare Tuchman’s book flat-out immoral. Paul’s war in this book is so much more (and, from Tuchman’s vantage, so much less) than that story, that the experiences seem to wrestle which each other to wear the stamp of truth.

And, if only one version of World War I can go down as the truth, I’ll insist on this one over hers any time. To do otherwise is to let slip an implicit lie: that war is, as Clausewitz said, “politics by other means.”

There is nothing political about All Quiet on the Western Front. It is human in the deepest sense. Our narrator’s suffering and endurance earn our admiration regardless of the side he’s fighting for.

In one of the most harrowing scenes, he has managed to kill a French soldier who’s jumped into the same crater in which he’s taken shelter. He’s killed to keep from dying himself, but he’s seized with a sudden sense of the wrong he’s committed. He then carries on a long soliloquy with the dying/dead man. He allows himself to glimpse the other man’s life, looking at the letters he’s received and the pictures of the family he’s left behind. Then, even as he does so, he feels himself hardening his heart, feels himself withdrawing the sympathy that came so naturally.

It’s a scene that feels as authentic as any I can imagine about the horrors we subject our soldiers to. Tuchman’s generals and kings make the decisions, but you can’t say, after reading this, that they make the war. The war happens instead through the character, the bravery, the fear, the decency, and inhumanity, of the individual soldiers who suffer through it.

I’m tempted to compare this as well to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as competing masterpieces of the moment. The trouble is that much of Hemingway’s genius comes in the style he developed for insinuating his story more than for the indirect way in which he tells it. This is a direct account, one more naturalistic (and therefore less Modern), but one that’s equally devastating.

I can’t know the quality of the translation here, but a couple lines do stand out. He writes early, “We are 18 and have begun to love life. Then we have to shoot it to pieces.” And at the end, when he is wrapping up a visit to the medics, “A hospital alone shows we are warriors,” asserting that there is no grandeur to their bravery, only a bodily suffering.

This is remarkable from its tight, direct beginning to its final sentences. If you get the chance, read it. More importantly, if you hear too much in our politics or our history celebrating the possibility of war, read it again.


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Review: The Invisibles, Vol. 7: The Invisible Kingdom

The Invisibles, Vol. 7: The Invisible Kingdom by Grant Morrison
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I made it through the extended hallucination that is Grant Morrison’s collected Invisibles, and I’m still boggled. One of the few things I know, though, is that the first six volumes have a coherence (if that’s the right word) that isn’t quite here for the seventh.

There’s a continuity of style in the earlier works, but The Invisible Kingdom feels like a sequel, as if Morrison, having once decided he’d reached the end, saddled up for another go-round.

Some of the best elements remain. I love, for instance, this sentence – uttered near the end by a character I still can’t identify, “What do people do when they know they’re on camera? They act! That’s why the world’s turning into a science fiction movie. Surveillance makes us all into stars.” If I heard the schizophrenic guy on the park bench next to me, I’d keep listening. I might not introduce myself, but I’d keep listening.

Still, the work to get to such good stuff is even harder than before.

Most notably, the art is thicker and less subtle. Morrison relies on a regularly changing crew of artists, and that both changes the tone and adds to the confusion. Sometimes old characters come forward, but they look different enough that you can’t be certain they’re who you think they are. Is that the “wealthy playboy” Mason Lang? Or is it another black-haired guy who’s put on weight?

And, if it was often bewildering when there was one team of Invisibles supported by key players (like Jolly Roger and Jim Crow) now there’s a whole rolodex of seeming allies. I’m still not sure how Division X ties into the crew.

So, while I liked this, I’d have been OK with stopping after the sixth collected volume. I’d like to get to more Morrison, but next time I’ll try to start at the beginning of something rather than get deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole he’s already dug out.


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