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.
"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…"Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is definitely a family story – it's about her relatiosnship with her father and her father's suspected secrets/secret life… (For that matter, her Dykes to Watch Out For strip/books are "family" stories, if you consider her cast an extended family…)
I think this is the first review of the book that got the spelling of the title right and the spelling of my name wrong :)Thanks for checking it out, Andrew.-Neil Kleid
I'm very sorry about the name mistake — the only excuse I can make is that I was obsessing about spelling "Cinquegrani" and "Novgorodoff" correctly and took my eye off the ball on your name. I've fixed it now. Thanks for pointing it out politely and humorously.