December 3, 2006
Stars and Strips

By DAVID HAJDU
AN ANTHOLOGY OF GRAPHIC FICTION, CARTOONS, AND TRUE STORIES

Edited by Ivan Brunetti.

Illustrated. 400 pp. Yale University Press. $28.

Upholding its duty to officiate lay consecration in America, Time magazine recently assessed the latest candidates for anointment as the literary voice of the young generation, and the magazine found no writer worthy of the honor. “Every once in a while,” the Time book critic Lev Grossman noted, there comes a novel that “feels as current as tomorrow’s e-mail, that gives readers the story of their own secret ineffable desperation with such immediacy” that the work seems to encapsulate its era; it has the sound of its time. “Every once in a while,” Grossman reiterated, “but not lately.”

Outlining some possible reasons for this plight, the Time piece cited the industrialization of creative writing through overabundant M.F.A. programs, literary brain drain to “better-paying media with bigger audiences” like television, and the prospect that the muses are taking “a smoke break.” All these are good theories. At the same time, Ivan Brunetti’s new “Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories” suggests something else: that Time was simply looking in the wrong place. These days, the novel — at least the novel as we have always known it, as a long (or longish) work of prose — is scarcely the only kind of book being made by smart, imaginative young (or youngish) people. Some deeply gifted writers and artists are working to evoke not only the sound of our time, through writing, but the sights, through the union of words and drawings that Brunetti’s anthology refers to as graphic fiction and most people call comics (and sometimes spell as comix). If anyone really qualifies as the voice of the current literary generation, he or she could well be using the language of cartoons, captions and word balloons.

Of course, it has always taken time for disreputable, vernacular modes of expression to earn parity with traditional, formal ones, at least in the eyes of mainstream institutions. In 1927, the American Academy of Arts and Letters sponsored a concert to celebrate American music, and it featured, most notably, Charles Martin Loeffler’s symphonic poem “Memories of My Childhood” and Ernest Schelling’s impressionistic “Suite Fantastique.” In the “race” section of the record bins, meanwhile, enthusiasts of a new style of popular music called jazz (sometimes spelled jass) could find some recent recordings by a New Orleans composer and trumpet player, Louis Armstrong, and his bands, the Hot Five and the Hot Seven — music now recognized as masterpieces by a primary innovator, the voice of his time. Among the events that helped establish jazz as a serious art was the concert “From Spirituals to Swing,” staged at Carnegie Hall in 1938 by the impresario John Hammond. The series brought together an eclectic mix of important African-American musicians — the gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the bluesman Big Joe Turner, the jazz artists Albert Ammons, James P. Johnson, Sidney Bechet, the Count Basie Orchestra and more — in the same hall famous for presenting Stokowski, Toscanini and their high-toned like. With this anthology, Brunetti has given us a hard-cover parallel to those Carnegie Hall concerts, a collection of works by venturesome popular artists elevated from the funky outskirts of the court by the associative power of the academy — in this case, Yale University Press.

The book is a manifesto of comics’ coming of age. Unlike several earlier anthologies of comics, including two dense volumes published by the Smithsonian (one of newspaper comics, one of comic-book stories) and a fine collection of newspaper strips compiled by the comics artist Jerry Robinson (“The Comics”), the “Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories” is not an overview of the history of comics from their birth in the lurid Sunday supplements of the turn of the last century through the rise of superheroes in the late 1930s to the triumph of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer for “Maus” in 1992. Rather, it concentrates almost solely on recent work by contemporary artists and writers doing what Brunetti calls “art comics” — personal, deeply intimate, idiosyncratic and sometimes wild comics published for the most part by independent presses. (The stories by some artists here were originally self-published and nominally distributed.) The book’s mission is not to illustrate how the art of comics has grown over the years, but to introduce the reader to that grown-up art. The book also includes a handful of specimens from deep comics history — a Sunday-newspaper page of “Krazy Kat,” one of “Gasoline Alley” and a few others, though all were chosen because they “have retained a ‘modern’ sensibility accessible to today’s reader.”

Brunetti, a comics artist and writer himself, is best known for his comic-book series “Schizo,” a hodge-podge of spare, poetic vignettes heavily influenced by Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts.” He has included only two exemplary pages of his own in the 400 pages of work by 75 artists and writers, from such prominent figures as Spiegelman, Lynda Barry, Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb and Chris Ware, to many who have been laboring unduly in relative obscurity, like Gabrielle Bell, Debbie Drechsler, Justin Green and Richard McGuire. In his terse introduction, Brunetti explains his simple criteria for selection: “These are comics that I savor and often revisit.” This anthology is an elementally personal one. Reading it, one gets a vivid sense of Brunetti’s tastes — and, through the book’s conspicuous omissions, his distastes. He likes the funnies to be funny; we get few adventure stories — not even, among the historical selections, a panel of “Little Lulu” or Carl Barks’s “Donald Duck,” both of which were more dramatic than literally comic. He loves “Peanuts”; we find 10 pages of tributes to Schulz by contemporary artists, including Spiegelman and Ware. He is fascinated with design; we see on consecutive pages the relationship between the dark, pedophilic outsider art of Henry Darger and the manic panels of the early 20th-century newspaper strip “The Kin-der Kids.” He is indifferent, even silently hostile, to superheroes, none of whom appear anywhere in the book, aside from an ironic use of hero-comic ideas in a lovely piece, a child’s dreamscape, by Ware. While Brunetti echoes the disdain for reductive distinctions between high and low that comics defenders have employed since the critic Gilbert Seldes praised “Krazy Kat” in 1924, he imposes a hierarchy of his own. There is no question that the vast bulk of superhero comics are factory-made product, rather than works of individual expression; still, at least a few mainstream comics published in recent years — including a series of Batman stories drawn by David Mazzucchelli, who has other work in the anthology — are as artful and subtle as some stories in this book.

Aain unlike past anthologies of comics — indeed, unlike many anthologies of most kinds — this one is conceived not as a reference book but as an episodic narrative. “After much deliberation,” Brunetti explains, “I have chosen to arrange the work so that it flows smoothly, unobstructed by strict chronology.” The stories connect, one to another, with threads sewn deep: A tale of quiet despair, by Jerry Moriarty, leads to another of genteel solitude by Ben Katchor; a memoir of childlike sexless love by Chester Brown leads us to one of frantic carnal yearning by Joe Matt. This design works — so well that despite the mad variety of visual styles in the book, one comes away with an appreciation for the commonalty of serious comics today. “Graphic fiction,” whether fantastical or quotidian, bleak or giddy, begins through this book to feel very much like a movement, like art in a well-conceived gallery show or music in a well-organized festival. (I should add that it would not have undermined this effect to provide dates somewhere in the book for the works anthologized; although many pieces are dated within the art, others are printed with no hint of when they were created or originally published. If space constraints deterred Brunetti from devoting a couple of pages to this data, he could easily have cut one story — for instance, the clumsy noodling of Aline Kominsky-Crumb.)

Of the many artists in this movement, at least a few are surely worth consideration in the next vote for the literary voice of our time — although not all are under 40, if the rules are tight about age. The pages of the “Anthology” make cases for nominations for Clowes, Green, Adrian Tomine and Kim Deitch, to start: Clowes for irony so complex that it seems the very bio-system of his comic-book world; Green for his nightmare humor — nuns administer shock treatments through cross-topped metal helmets! — and sweet vulgarity; Tomine for his graceful evocation of loneliness and rage; and Deitch for her cynical romance with the past and sheer kookiness of spirit.

Now going under the name graphic fiction, no doubt temporarily, the comics are all grown up, and this anthology represents the most cogent proof since Will Eisner pioneered the graphic novel and Art Spiegelman brought long-form comics to early perfection. What other kinds of art or entertainment invented for young people ever transcended their provenance as kid stuff? Not coloring books, nor paper dolls, nor board games. There are no Etch a Sketch drawings in the Museum of Modern Art and no View-Master slides in the International Center for Photography. While it took more than a century for the medium to be accepted as suitable for adults, the fact that the comics made it here at all testifies to their resilience and adaptability.

David Hajdu is the author of “Positively Fourth Street.” His book about comics, “The Ten-Cent Plague,” will be published next year.