Author: Andrew Wheeler

Asterios Polyp
David Mazzucchelli
Pantheon, July 2009, $29.95

Comics are an essentially mongrel art, bred out of the
scraps of two prior art-forms in the great kennel of popular culture. That’s no
bad thing, despite what the mandarins might say – mongrels typically have the
strengths of both parents, without the fussiness and decadent weakness
characteristic of arts that only breed incestuously. Of course comics then are
called bastards, which is both a slander and absolute truth. The slander only stings
if one thinks being a bastard is a bad thing.

Asterios Polyp, for example, is a bastard, and the graphic
novel that bears his name is – and this is only one of the things it is, but we’ll start there – the story
of how he finally, much too late in his life, learns how not to be quite so
much of a bastard as he was before. We see Asterios in appropriately classical
form: both before and after his downfall, as if he’s both at once. More
importantly, though, [[[Asterios Polyp]]]
is the story of comics themselves, as it dramatizes the interplay of the
elements that come together to make up comics. Asterios is a renowned teaching architect:
serious, linear, dogmatic, didactic, Apollonian, a maker of dichotomies. And he
comes up against the Dionysian side of the world again and again, symbolically
ramming his axe-shaped head into the places where the world doesn’t fit his
categories, willing it into the forms he’s decided are right for it.

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George Sprott: 1894-1975
Seth
Drawn & Quarterly, May
2009, $24.95

Comics very, very rarely tell stories about old, fat, boring
men, which most people probably don’t think is a problem. But no art form can
ever become mature if it ignores large swaths of the world, and it’s
indisputable that our world is filled
with men who are old, or fat, or boring, or (even worse) all three at once.
Maybe none of us would ever want comics to be only about the Sprotts among us, but the fact that there’s
now room for comics about them is a good sign.

[[[George Sprott: 1894-1975]]] is an expanded version of a story that originally appeared from late 2006 through March of 2007 in single-page installments in the [[[New York Times Magazine’s]]] “Funny Pages” section. (Which, by the way, seems to have quietly ended with
Gene Luen Yang’s story “Prime Baby” a few months back.) In the Times serialization, each installment of Sprott was a single large page, essentially a chapter of
the longer work. Those pages appear here, in the same sequence and not apparently
changed, but they’re surrounded by new work – both Seth’s usually impeccable
(if chilly, and in his typical blue tones) book design, with illustrations and
decorations, and some new comics stories to expand that original story. Primary
among the new work is a sequence of eight stories – each one three pages long, and
each taking place on one particular day, in a different decade over Sprott’s
long life, arranged from 1906 through 1971 as the book goes on. There’s also an
impressive six-page fold-out, near the end of the book, that looks to depict
Sprott’s scattered thoughts as he died. On top of those, there are short
introductory and ending pieces: the first is thematically interesting, if
mostly wheel-spinning, while the new two-page “Sign Off” from the fictional TV station that Sprott worked for is another slab of very provincial Canadian
bacon added to a plate already swimming in maple flavoring and Timbits.

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Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays
Edited by Brendan Burford
Villard, May 2009, $16.95

For most of the past fifty years, American comics had been running
through an ever-tightening spiral of acceptable topics – somewhat mitigated by
occasional art-comics eruptions – as superheroes and (ever less and less) other
areas thought acceptable for children dominated ever more and more each year.
And one little-remarked side effect of that spiral was that nonfiction comics,
stories that actually were true, became so marginalized that they practically
didn’t exist. Everything was fiction – even the memoirish comics of the
undergrounds were transmuted into fiction – and the truth was nowhere to be
found on the comics page.

That’s changed in the past decade or so, as a generation of
new or newly energized creators have grappled with their own lives and
histories, bringing forth a host of primarily memoir-based comics, from [[[Perseopolis]]] to [[[Fun Home to Cancer Vixen]]]. And
that flood has brought attention to cartoonists who write about true stories
that aren’t their own, like Joe
Sacco. Slowly, nonfiction is creeping onto the comics shelf – it may be mostly
memoirs now, but I hope that we’ll see ever more biographies (like Rick Geary’s
J. Edgar Hoover) and histories
(like Larry Gonick’s work) and even diet books (like Carol Lay’s [[[The
Big Skinny]]]) and less likely things. Maybe,
if I can be optimistic for once, in twenty years there will be comics (or
graphic novels, or whatever you want to call a couple of hundred of drawn pages
in a coherent narrative) in every bookstore category, filling the shelves with
real stories as well as made-up ones.

If that does happen – and I hope that it is
possible – Brendan Burford’s [[[Syncopated]]] will become a signpost on the way to that new world. Syncopated has sixteen original stories by sixteen
distinctive voices (Burford among them), on various nonfiction topics. It splits
fairly neatly in half between memoirs and personal reminiscences on one side
(seven pieces, by my count) and works of history and current events outside of
the artist (also seven pieces), with two portfolios of drawings, by Tricia Van
de Burgh and Victor Marchand Kerlow, to finish up.

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