The Graphic Cannon Volume 3

I looked at the contents table and saw Rudyard Kipling’s If. Drawn to it I was, because I’d gone to middle school in the UK and was schooled on Kipling’s verse (not as popular in the USA.) The chapter was shocking; it was illustrated with Frank Hansen’s wild cartooning, like something out f Ren & Stimpy. His wild style is the opposite what Kipling, a paternalistic upper-class English imperialist, would want to illustrate his writing. The teacher who drilled Kipling into me was your typical Wackford Squeers kind of Englishman, and I would’ve loved to show him this version of his idol’s poem. It would’ve ruined his day.

The Graphic Canon is both reverent & irreverent, supportive & subversive. Over 70 stories, essays, excerpts, and poems, are illustrated by some of today’s most lauded cartoonists. There is no greater tribute than this, for who could illustrate Jean Paul Sartre’s work than Robert Crumb, the great American weirdo and Francophile? For Kafka’s story, Sikoryak turns Metamorphosis into a Peanuts parody called Good Ol’ Gregor Brown, starring Charlie Brown as the perplexed Gregor Samsa and Lucy as his sister Grete. He wakes up to find himself turned into a giant cockroach, and says “good grief, what’s happened to me?”

But I must also confess a slight disappointment. Animal Farm is illustrated with photo collages, and it lends an air of disturbing, creepy imagery, but it falls short. I would love to see Dave McKean illustrate animal farm with his bizarre collages, as he did a great job with Mister Punch back in 1995. Other than that, the book is great. There’s a version of The Woman From Wood’s Edge by Edna St. Vincent Millay, charmingly illustrated by Jay Kolitsky, and it evokes Victorian British innocence with just the right amount of naughty rebelliousness.

Flash From The Bowery

Today’s historians study tattoo art with great fascination, and it’s only become an intellectual curiosity in the past 20 years. Why not until that point, I don’t know, but I do remember that by the late 90’s there was greater interest in it. Perhaps there’s something fascinating about the kind of artwork that one would have permanently drawn on himself? Tattoos were worn mostly by sailors, and the designs were usually the same, but the question is why.

Flash From The Bowery is a book of original tattoo stencils from the Black Eye Barbershop on the Bowery and Chatham Square, the same tattoo parlor where the electric tattoo gun was invented. It was on The Bowery where you’d find all the tattoo parlors, the same street where Norman Rockwell got the idea for his painting of the tattooist inking out the sailor’s ex-girlfriends. It was a sleazy block, full of bars, flophouses, and what would eventually become CBGB’s. The designs in this book were the “archive” of Black Eye’s resident artist, and when he died in the 1950’s, an employee saved what he could of their supplies. The designs ended up in the hands of Cliff White, a modern day tattooist. But the designs themselves date back much earlier. In those days you couldn’t go to a Barnes & Noble bookstore and buy a full-color coffee table book of tattoos. The artists would trace or photograph the existing tattoos of their customers, and in exchange give them a discount on a new one.

The only problem is the history of the actual designs. I would love to know the origins of the flowers, skulls, dice, scantily clad women. By Cliff White’s account, most of the customers were sailors (hence the large number of ship tattoos) or circus employees. If there were foreign sailors getting tattoos done at Black Eye’s, then I wonder if the American, British, and European designs were markedly different. I saw a photo of some French criminals who were detained at Ellis Island in the 1900’s, and they had tattoos of women, boxers, snakes, the usual art. I’m going to guess that the cards & dice motif might indicate willingness to take risk, while the half-naked women were reminders of home. If you’re at sea for a few months, and there are no women on board, perhaps the tattoo satisfies your erotic needs? The skulls could be descended from the memento mori (“remember, one day you will die”) of classical artwork, evoking a reminder of mortality. Paintings with this motto in mind usually placed a flower next to the skull, symbolizing life & death. Perhaps that explains why flowers were so popular in tattooing? Racism is also evident by the tattoos showing stabbed Chinese heads. Though the author assumes this was from the “Yellow Peril,” I believe it is from the US Navy campaign in China in the 1920’s (seen in the film The Sand Pebbles.)

You can include tattoos in the study of US history, and there’s plenty in there to compare the changes in American habits. Back in the 1950’s, tattoos were the kind of thing the wearer kept hidden, but nowadays they’re commonplace. It used to be considered low-class for women to have tattoos, but now I see “respectable” women with all kinds of ink-Japanese koi, scarabs, boyfriends’ names, even old fashioned sailor tattoos (in better quality than the originals.) Perhaps it has a lot to do with women’s rights? I can just imagine a high school student in the 1960’s showing up to school with a visible shoulder tattoo, the principal would’ve thrown a fit. Now, the principal can’t do anything about it. For teenagers, a tattoo has become a symbol that (at least in their own opinion) they’re all grown up.

Too Cool To Be Forgotten

A 38 year old computer programmer goes under hypnosis and goes back in time to when he was a kid in the 1980’s. We’ve seen this concept before; it was the plot of Back To The Future, and even a Twilight Zone episode. The idea of going back in time and trying to right all the wrongs has been used in many other books and movies, and often with zany results.

I won’t give the plot away, but I will say this; he goes back to 1987 when he was 17 years old, and slips right back into 80’s fashion and lingo. He doesn’t lead the kids in rebellion, as you might suspect. On the contrary, he goes back to being a teenager emotionally because that’s the position he’s in. He has serious thoughts on whether or not to stay back in time, maybe start off the dot-com boom, become an independent record producer and sign Kurt Cobain.

One of the reasons I loved this book so much was for the same reason we all loved Back To The Future. When kids see adult authority figures, they assume they were always adults. Ask any high school student, they’ll say they think that the teacher was always a bald middle aged math teacher. They’ll never guess that the teacher used to smoke pot and blast Van Halen on the radio of his parents’ car. They’ll never believe that their mom and dad were once teenagers.

Only Alex Robinson, author of Box Office Poison and Tricked could pull this off. His comics are all about Generation-X growing old and coming to terms with it.

We Won’t See Auschwitz by Jeremy Dres

Poland is something of a no-go for Jewish people. If you ask a Jew what he thinks about Poland, he’ll tell you all about the Holocaust, and how there are no Jews left there. But in this wonderful graphic novel, you’ll see that the opposite is true. There are Jews in Poland, and the Poles are not the pitchfork-wielding peasants intent on driving the Jews out.

Jeremy Dres assumes the worst when he visits Poland. What he finds is that the Jews who left after WWII were mostly the ones from the countryside, and before the war they were farmers. But the urbane educated ones didn’t all leave, in fact a lot of them stayed on afterwards. The Jews of Poland today are often employed in civil service jobs, and they are in positions of importance. As they go into the countryside, a lot of their fears turn out to be unfounded. It’s been years since there were any Shtetls in Poland, and most Poles haven’t met any Jews anyway, so it’s unlikely there’ll be any real anti-Semitism. As for the Christian based anti-Semitism, I doubt most young Poles today ever bother to go to church.

There are Jews that visit Poland every two years. We have something called March Of The Living, where Jewish teenagers from all over the world visit the remains of the death camps. They have a protest march from Auschwitz to Birkinau to say “you lost, we’re not all dead.” Some of my classmates went there back in 1996, and remember the photos of locals lining the streets to jeer at them. Most of them said “I grew up in that time, and I had no idea what those camps were for.” But others would say (in hushed tones) “I knew what was happening in Auschwitz, I could smell the burning bodies.” Nowadays, the Poles are not as hostile to stories about the Holocaust, but at the same time, can we expect them to feel guilty? To Jewish people, it’s a big part in our history, but to Poland it’s just history. This book isn’t really about history, but the present. It focuses on those who are still living.

I give the artwork top scores. The simple pen and ink drawings are perfect for this book. My only problem is that some more background information would have been welcome. I would like to have seen more detailed maps, like we saw in Maus, to show where they were going. Other than that, I’d recommend it to anyone studying Jewish history. The case of the Jewish community in modern Poland has rarely been taken into account. 

The Voyeurs by Gabrielle Bell

Gabrielle goes to France and Japan with filmmaker Michele Gondry, who intends to make a movie of her last comic Cecil & Jordan. Along the way she illustrates the many annoyances of her life, ranging from computer addiction to bad food. She goes to get her laptop fixed, and now she’s freaking out that it’ll take five days. For anyone under 35 years old, five days with no computer is like going cold turkey after a 10 year crack habit. Like most of Generation-Y, she can’t live without the internet, but after five days without it, she kind of likes it. She asks the store to remove the air card so she’ll never use the web again, and they say “just turn it off.” But she can’t. The only guy she knows that doesn’t use the internet is a homeless man.

Woman Rebel

Peter Bagge wastes no time in telling the story of Margaret Sanger, the controversial birth control advocate. From the very first page he uses his manic, large-mouthed style to portray Sanger’s frustration. She was from an era where women were expected to be slaves to their husbands, and if the husband couldn’t feed the wife and kids, well too bad. Women had no recourse. Her alcoholic ner-do-well father preached socialism, while his wife got sick from repeated pregnancies (some of which she miscarried). Obviously, her father’s ideals of freedom didn’t extend to his wife and kids.

One of the reasons Peter Bagge’s drawings work so well is that they never seem to stand still. They always appear to be flapping around and yelling, which is exactly how things would’ve been. Sanger was fighting with her husband throughout their marriage, and when she worked on the Lower East Side, it was bombardment of sight and sound. It gets funny when she meets Havelock Ellis and George Bernard Shaw, because the characters are not manic at all. The dialogue between her and Ellis is hilarious because it’s completely dry; Ellis states his life choices matter-of-factly (they’d be seen as bizarre even today) to the shock of the conservative Sanger. She reacts just as I expect when Ellis says “I am only aroused at the sight of a woman urinating, then I masturbate.” It was the kind of news that would give the average American a heart attack.

Those of you that loved Bagge’s Hate comic will love his colorful, wild, and exciting here. He’s crafted an enjoyable and engaging biography of Sanger, a very controversial woman in US history. But I have one suggestion for Bagge, and it’s to make a comic about Anthony Comstock. That man features prominently in this book, and despite his reputation as the king of prudes, his life story and his antics were interesting.

I can just imagine Comstock pouring over one of Sanger’s pamphlets, sweat running down his face, and yelling “vagina, oh my god, what a horrible word!”

The Comical Tragedy of Mister Punch

I never could understand why Punch and Judy are a kiddie show act. Not only are they the creepiest puppets ever, but the plots of the stories deserve an R rating; punch spends the whole show beating his wife, throwing the baby down the stairs, and tormenting everyone he can. I used to see Punch and Judy shows in England, and I sat through them out of stubbornness. The urge to run away was overwhelming.

The story here is equally creepy; a little boy spends the summer with his grandfather at his creepy seaside amusement park, and along comes a creepy Punch and Judy showman to make things creepier. In contrast to the boy is the showman’s assistant, a teenager who looks as though the job is the only thing keeping him out of jail (and not for too long, judging by his outlook.) While the boy is both fascinated and frightened by the showman and the carnival (and his grandfather, for that matter) the teen sees right through the whole thing. He knows that the show and the carnival are relics of a bygone era.

Only Dave McKean could illustrate something as frightening as this. By combining photos with hand-drawn illustration, he creates a haunting, lurid backdrop reminiscent of Jan Svankmajer’s animation. For those of you unfamiliar with Dave McKean, he’s the guy that did the Sandman covers in the 1990’s, and those things used to give me nightmares. Sandman was DC’s foray into mature-themed material, and Mister Punch would fit right at home in there.

A little research tells me that Punch comes from Pulcinello, a character from Italian puppet shows, and his name means “chicken” thanks to his massive nose and a voice like a rooster’s squawk. He’s violent, deceptive, and when confronted with something he’s done, he’ll feign ignorance and/or stupidity. He’s usually paired with Arleccino (or Harlequin in English), his agile trickster alter-ego, who I might add is descended from a more demonic character of legend (hence the multicolored costume.)

No matter how much English kids love this guy, I can’t look Punch in the face without getting creeped out. Those beady eyes, the leering grin, he is scary.