Comics By DOUGLAS WOLK

The New York Times
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December 6, 2009
Holiday Books
Comics By DOUGLAS WOLK

Kyle Baker’s graphic novel SPECIAL FORCES (Image, paper, $16.99) reads at first like a nearly straightforward military fantasy, drawn with a peculiar hybrid of hyper­realistic precision and nutty exaggeration. Eventually, though, Baker bares his fangs: the book is the harshest, most serrated satire of the Iraq war yet published. These forces are “special” as in “Mama says I’m special” — the unstop­pable American soldier Zone is severely autistic, which is why he’s so good at following orders. And the story’s plot, it gradually becomes clear, proceeds from the premise that every lie the Bush administration told about the war was true. So terrorists declare, “We hate your freedom”; felons forced into military service become brave tactical geniuses who wouldn’t dream of hurting children; and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction are not only real but concealed in an oil refinery, where Americans would never think to look because of course the war wasn’t about oil.

The style and tone of Gabrielle Bell’s comics are at the opposite end of the spectrum from Baker’s — flat, dry and understated — but they allow her, too, to get away with just about anything. The brief title piece of her collection CECIL AND JORDAN IN NEW YORK: Stories (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95) is narrated by a young woman who’s just moved to the city with her filmmaker boyfriend; it’s a clear-cut tale of impecunious 20-something artists until halfway through, when the narrator abruptly transforms herself into a chair, gets taken home by someone who finds her on the sidewalk and decides that her old life won’t miss her. The engine of these mercilessly observed stories is squirminess: emotional awkwardness so intense that it can erupt into magic or just knot itself into scars.

Lilli Carré’s NINE WAYS TO DISAPPEAR (Little Otsu, paper, $12.95) takes the same sort of discomfort as its starting point and aestheticizes it into fluid Symbolist imagery. It’s a laconic, darkly amusing set of short pieces about involution and self-­effacement, with a single drawing on each little square page, framed in a decorative border. Some are surreal narratives (“We all resorted to eating the fruit that grew from my sister’s wildness in order to sustain ourselves,” explains the narrator of “Dorado Park”); others are barely gestures (a man repeats “What am I going to do?” until the thought itself turns into a beast that absorbs him, crushes his chair and lies down to sleep).

The chubby, self-important protagonist of the Canadian cartoonist Seth’s GEORGE SPROTT, 1894-1975 (Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95) is the host of a local TV show built around documentary footage from his trips to the Arctic in the 1930s, which is to say that he’s the kind of person who’s been made extinct by modernity. Expanded from the much shorter version serialized a few years ago in The New York Times Magazine, this oversize, exquisitely designed volume is part scrapbook, part documentary about its fictional subject’s life and death. It approaches its subject from dozens of angles, from “interviews” with his intimates to immense, silent drawings of ice floes, all rendered in the painstakingly simple, bold brush strokes of midcentury illustration — a style of which Seth is the chief contemporary caretaker. As with most of his work, it’s a memorial to a lost age of localism and craft, even as it’s painfully alert to the dangerous allure of nostalgia.

Back in the 1980s and ’90s, Art Spiegel­man and Françoise Mouly made their bones as the editors of the bleeding-edge art-comics anthology RAW, but they also have a longstanding fascination with the wholly innocent comics that the medium’s early masters created to entertain small children. The material they’ve selected for THE TOON TREASURY OF CLASSIC CHILDREN’S COMICS (Abrams Comic­Arts, $40) appeared mostly in the 1940s and ’50s, and it has the patina of vintage newsprint in its faithfully reproduced smudges of off-register color. A handful of these stories feature familiar names, including Carl Barks’s Uncle Scrooge, C. C. Beck’s Captain Marvel (in an adventure involving Surrealist art) and Walt Kelly’s Pogo; many others are long-forgotten wonders, like George Carlson’s supremely ridiculous “Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzleburg” and Sheldon Mayer’s high-­whimsical “Sugar and Spike.” But all were clearly drawn out of genuine love for little kids and their sensibilities, and their playfulness and attention to detail made them the springboard for the comics avant-garde that arrived a few decades later.

The blandly didactic sobriety of old educational comics and earnest advertisements, on the other hand, is Michael Kupper­man’s default tone for the deranged, gaspingly funny work collected in TALES DESIGNED TO THRIZZLE: Volume One (Fantagraphics, $24.99). Kupperman has a stiff, deadpan drawing style that suggests the textures of woodcuts, clip-art and old “Mary Worth” strips; his writing, on the other hand, jumps the rails at every opportunity. A boilerplate informational cartoon about Christmas and Easter abruptly changes into a screed about Jesus’ wicked half-brother Pagus (“Yes! Yes! Decorate that tree! Wonderful! Ha ha ha ha ha!”), Mark Twain and Albert Einstein solve mysteries as a pair of brutal cops, and a bar graph at the end of a series of images called “A Look Into the Near Future” is captioned “We have no idea what this graph means, because the person who made it was found this morning . . . murdered!”

The artists assembled by Andrei Molotiu for his anthology ABSTRACT COMICS (Fantagraphics, $39.99) push “cartooning” to its limits: the selections have few if any words, no characters or plot, and very few clearly identifiable representations — just abstract images in sequence. Some contributors draw on comics’ native vocabulary for their lines and compositions, while others avoid contour drawing altogether. (The “Mutts” artist Patrick McDonnell’s sequence is mostly circles, right angles and negative space; Janusz Jaworski’s watercolor blobs “communicate” with word balloons full of meaningless scribbles.) It’s a fascinating book to stare at, and as with other kinds of abstract art, half the fun is observing your own reactions: anyone who’s used to reading more conventional sorts of comics is likely to reflexively impose narrative on these abstractions, to figure out just what each panel has to do with the next.

Douglas Wolk is the author of “Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean.” He writes frequently about comics for The Times.

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