Wed Sep 30, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler

Fathers and Sons: reviews of Danica Novgorodoff's 'Refresh, Refresh' and 'The Big Kahn' by Neil Kleid and Nicolas Cinquegrani

I should start by quoting something weighty – the most obvious would be that old Tolstoy saw about happy and unhappy families – but let’s take that as written, shall we? Comics have given short shrift to families for the past seventy years – at least, the American comic-book industry has, though strip comics grew fat and bloated on the hijinks of aggressively “relatable” families for that long and longer.

Even the undergrounds – typically about countercultural types, who occasionally complain about their parents but try to avoid them as much as possible – and the modern alt-comics movement (Alienated Loners R us!) avoided family dynamics. Sure, there are exceptions, from Will Eisner to art spiegelman, but the average American comics protagonist is an orphan – or wishes he was.

Maybe that’s starting to change, or maybe I just have a couple of anomalies on my hand. Either way, today, I have two books where that isn’t the case – not to say that these dads might not be dead, absent, or problematic, but they’re definitely part of the story. And their sons care who, and what – and where – their fathers are.

Refresh, Refresh
A graphic novel by Danica Novgorodoff, adapted from a screenplay by James Ponsoldt based on the story by Benjamin Percy
First Second, October 2009, $17.99

What do men do? For many in the comics reviewing world, that’s an easy question: men punch each other in the face. But they don’t have Refresh, Refresh in mind when they say that. This graphic novel is set in a small Oregon town, just a couple of years ago, where most of the adult men are off fighting with the Marines in Iraq. And their sons – mostly Cody and Josh and Gordon, three highschool-aged boys who are at the core of this particular story – talk about joining up when they’re old enough, or working in the local factory, or maybe even getting out.

But Refresh, Refresh is based on a literary short story, and if there’s one thing we all know, it’s that there’s no getting out of a story like that – it’s all doom and gloom until the moment-of-clarity ending. So this town is stifling and without any options, the boys drifting – from backyard boxing to underage drinking in bars to racing around on motorbikes and sleds – as they rebel without any fathers to drag them into line. (The narration – presumably taken from the original Percy story; I don’t want to blame Novgorodoff for any of it – is particularly heavy-handed in that area, such as this sequence from p.83: “We didn’t fully understand the reason our fathers were fighting. We only understood that they had to fight. ‘It’s all part of the game,’ my grandfather said. ‘It’s just the way it is.’ We could only cross our fingers and wish on stars and hit refresh, refresh, hoping they would return to us.”)

What they hit “refresh, refresh” on is their e-mail in-boxes; that scene recurs several times in the story. Oddly, though, it’s the only incursion of modern technology into a story that could otherwise be Vietnam-era. They don’t follow their fathers’ platoon on CNN.com or an Armed Forces website; don’t call each other on cellphones; don’t think about or track or seem to notice the war on TV or the Internet; even their laptops seem to be screwed down to tables, for all the moving they do.

Refresh, Refresh is a very traditional story about young men in small towns; I could probably quote half-a-dozen Bruce Springsteen songs on roughly the same topic, and with pretty much the same moral and tone. (And that’s without diving into the world of the realist short story, where kitchen-sink dramas almost require young men with promise to be squandered.) Novgorodoff tells this version with a bit too much self-conscious artistry – too many deer looking up at airplanes, too many of those explaining-the-theme narration boxes – but she keeps the focus tight and specific, on these three boys and their world, their choices and possibilities. A story like this is nearly always about badchoices, though, so it would be best to come to Refresh, Refresh with a MFA-teacher’s fatalism, and not expect anything so comic-booky as a happy ending for the boys who punch each other in the face.

The Big Kahn
Written by Neil Kleid; Drawn by Nicolas Cinquegrani
NBM, September 2009, $13.95

Every family has secrets, but some are worse than others. Some secrets are the kind everyone knows, but agrees not to talk about, like Uncle Walter’s unfortunate “tendencies” or what really happened to Cousin Janie back in ’72. But some are really secret, and those are the ones you have to watch out for. Rabbi David Kahn had a secret like that, one that only came out after his death.

Rabbi Kahn wasn’t actually Jewish, but a one-time con-artist named Donnie Dobbs, who fell in love with a Jewish girl and decided to turn a con into a life. Or so says the man who claims to be his brother, Roy Dobbs – a man who shows up at the funeral demanding to see his brother’s body and telling that story. Rabbi Kahn’s family – wife Rachel, older son (and young rabbi) Avi, teenage son Eli, and unreligious rebellious college-age daughter Lea – doesn’t want to believe Dobbs, but the reading of the late Rabbi’s will soon remove all of their doubts.

And so then they each go off on their own journeys to come to terms with the news: Avi losing his job at his father’s synagogue and having a liaison (secret, but incredibly scandalous for an observant unmarried Jew) with a friend of his sister’s; Rachel hallucinating, or perhaps witnessing, a whispering campaign against her among the women of the synagogue; Eli trying to learn some quick short cons to bring his father back; and Lea lashing out and then coming back.

The problem is that each of those is a separate journey. They’re interwoven as The Big Kahn goes on, but each member of the family has a separate story, and each of those stories has the air of a twice-told tale; something that we’ve all seen before and where the general contours (if not necessarily every twist and ending) are all familiar. Kleid moves his characters around well, and they always feel like real flesh-and-blood people, but there’s a feeling of familiarity throughout The Big Kahn, as if this precise story had been a minor Will Eisner graphic novel that everyone had forgotten, or something else like that.

Cinquegrani’s art has a flatness to it as well, with a thin layer of gray tone that removes depth rather than adds and sequences of masklike faces that hide rather than reveal emotions. (That’s appropriate much of the time – these are not deeply demonstrative people – but the faces stay focused and tight even when emotion is required.)

The Big Kahn asks a sequence of big questions – Are we our parents? Can we ever mold our own selves? Is culture, or heredity, destiny? – and then answers them all with the standard, middle-of-the-road answers. It’s just that much smaller and more limited than it should be, content to settle down to the comfortable rather than striking out in a new direction. It tells its story perfectly well, and brings the complicated, squabbling Kahn family to life…but it should have shaken up their lives more than it did, and not let them settle back in the end.

Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He’s been reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.

Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Andrew Wheeler directly at acwheele (at) optonline (dot) net.

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