Comical Lives: A Paired Review of ‘Little Nothings 2’ and ‘Giraffes in My Hair’
The impulse to anecdote is ubiquitous in mankind; we all
want to tell our own stories. Since those stories happened to us, we naturally think that they’re fascinating…and
sometime are surprised when the rest of the world doesn’t agree with us. Comics
creators have been spilling out their lives onto their pages for a few decades
now – since the undergrounds, if not before that – and the autobiographical comic
is now its own cliché. But there’s still room to do interesting things with autobiographical
materials – at least, I hope
there is, since it seems that we’re destined to be deluged with books of true
stories…
Little Nothings, Vol. 2: The Prisoner Syndrome
Lewis Trondheim
NBM/ComicsLit, March 2009,
$14.95
Trondheim mostly makes fictional comics – Dungeon and Kaput and Zosky and Mister O and many more – but he also has kept a comics blog
in French, mostly focused on the small moments of his life. Three collections
from the blog have been published in his native France; the first two have been
translated so far for the English-speaking world. (I reviewed the first one
here back in March of last year.)
For the “Little Nothings” blog, Trondheim works in
watercolor, mostly in single pages – each one the record of a single event, or
a short conversation. The emphasis is on observation – each strip is a crystallized
instant, and clearly the blog as a whole is not intended to seriously chronicle
Trondheim’s life. As with the Dungeon
books, all of the people are drawn anthropomorphically – Trondheim and his
family are various kinds of bird, and most of the others look like different
kinds of mammals – rats and dogs and cats. (In the usual unsettling way of
anthropomorphic comics, Trondheim’s family also has a pair of real cats, Orly
and Roissy, and other actual animals show up from time to time.)
Either Trondheim travels an awful lot or travel is more
conducive to diary comics than his regular life, since a clear majority of the
comics here are about trips – to the Angouleme comics festival (a year when he
was the Guest of Honor), several other comics events, and vacation in Greece,
Guadeloupe, and Corsica. That does keep Prisoner Syndrome from being a succession of Trondheim-sitting-at-his-desk
pages – there are a number of those, of course, since that’s where a cartoonist
spends most of his time – and ties nicely into the title. In one of the early
strips in this book, Trondheim learns about “Prisoner Syndrome,” in which
people who spend all of their time in the same place gradually get more and
more tired from doing less and less – and so he decides to go to more comics
festivals, to keep himself healthy.
There are no grand gestures in Prisoner
Syndrome, no deep thoughts or big
moments – the series is called Little
Nothings for a reason. But there
are many thoughtful little moments, of the kind that make up all of our lives,
and Trondheim is an artful and nuanced portrayer of his own internal life. It’s
a lovely book of the small things that go together to make up an everyday life.
Giraffes in my Hair: A Rock ‘N’ Roll Life
Written by Bruce Paley; Art by
Carol Swain
Fantagraphics, October 2009,
$19.99
Giraffes in My Hair
is a very different kind of autobiography – a collection of stories written by
Paley (who the press release says hasn’t written professionally before, which I
assume means he isn’t the Bruce Paley who wrote Jack the Ripper: The
Simple Truth) and illustrated by Swain (who
has previously written and illustrated her own stories), about Paley’s various misadventures
from 1967 to 1979 as a young ne’er-do-well. Paley and Swain are now a couple –
and have been for some time – but these stories take place long before that,
when Paley was young and aimless.
So what we have here, I think, is a comics professional turning
her partner’s anecdotes – of bumming around for a decade, basically, in search
of drugs and women and good times – into comics. I can only imagine the
conversations they had, as Swain tried to work out how to draw the prostitute
on p.130 (for example). I envy the strength their relationship must have, if
they can take on a project like this.
Paley’s stories are all at least mildly depressing, and not
just because so much time has passed since the days he’s writing about. They’re
about drinking, and doing drugs (and selling drugs, or trying to find drugs),
and wandering around the country, and that sort of youthful exuberance. But
there’s no joy in any of them – maybe because this is how Paley views his past
now, or maybe because it’s being filtered through Swain. There’s no explicit
condemnation of the young Paley, but he never seems to be having any fun, no
matter what he’s doing. Surely in a decade of being young and energetic and
fancy-free, he had some happier stories than these?
Giraffes in My Hair
then has to be seen as the way Paley wants to remember these years –
essentially his twenties – and it’s not a positive light. There’s some muted
moments of happiness here, but no triumphs and a lot of misery. These are
mostly “let me tell you about that crazy thing I did once…” stories, ones that
couldn’t have been pleasant when they happened but which work well as
retellings.
The title comes from a T. Rex song – it’s a line that Paley
never understood until one day when he took acid, and suddenly got it. He doesn’t
share that realization with the reader, and that’s emblematic of Giraffes in
My Hair: it’s all clear and connected in
Bruce Paley’s head, but that doesn’t all make it out onto the page. On the
other hand, the old saying was that if you could remember those days, then you
clearly weren’t there. So maybe this is all that Paley can remember…which proves he was really there.
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.