Unhappy Together
Unhappy Together
THE BEST AMERICAN COMICS 2007
Edited by Chris Ware.
Illustrated. 341 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $22 .
The comics collected in this book
range fairly far and wide, but the
strong center of gravity is plaintive
tales of everyday life, set in the present,
and usually about the social groups that
comic artists themselves belong to. The
appeal of such work is its emotional directness
— in this age of highly branded,
executive-produced cultural output, comics
promise a more resonant and unadulterated
link between creator and reader.
When the connection works, the reading
experience can be deeply satisfying.
Consider the excerpt here from Alison
Bechdel’s “Fun Home.” Even if you’re not
too familiar with comics, you may know
of Bechdel. In a watershed moment for
the entire field, this graphic-novel autobiography
was chosen as the best book
of 2006 by Time magazine. As stories go,
there’s little unusual about “Fun Home”:
it’s about a lonely girl in a small town,
trying to come to terms with secrets her
family kept by, in part, learning to write
and draw. But it’s wonderfully executed.
With terse prose and fluid shifts in scale
and perspective, Bechdel puts adolescence
in its pure form right on the page
— the jagged feelings of inadequacy, the
growing sense of distance from others,
the slow realization that life is difficult
and thorny and that you have to figure
out some way to help yourself because
nobody else is going to. Bechdel conveys
all this without ever seeming maudlin or
self-pitying. She’s also really funny.
I have a feeling, though, that she may
be a bad influence on comics, if only because,
like many talented artists, she
obscures the difficulty of the craft. She
makes it seem as if all you have to do is
record your own experience, and voilà,
you have a story worth telling to other
people.
A good number of the entries in “The
Best American Comics 2007” show the
pitfalls of this. Take, for instance, Jeffrey
Brown’s “These Things, These Things,”
a lo-fi slice of life involving a guy named
Jeff who fails at romance with a girl
named Sophia and finds meaning in the
music of Andrew Bird. It’s competent
enough but oh so slight. Puzzling over
what might qualify it as among the best
of the year, I read Brown’s brief statement
in the back of the book. “I found
that over a fairly short period of time, the
music of Andrew Bird seemed to have
crept in and infiltrated my life in a number
of ways, and then I realized this had been
happening long before I was aware of it,”
he said. “Somehow his music had become
a kind of map to part of my life.”
And from that, a best American comic
was born.
It would be wrong to expect comics to
provide the highly constructed, didactic
narratives that are supplied in abundance
by other art forms, like, say, television.
But reading through this book, you
see how autobiography becomes a trap,
a limit on creativity. Readers have their
own existential torpor to sort through;
they don’t necessarily need someone
else’s. Most of the stories here are so internally
focused that they bear little or no
marking of the time in which they were
created. If there is, for example, a single
reference to the war in Iraq, I missed it.
There is one beautifully composed, poignant
story about a woman and her child
fleeing a terrifying regime, and another
pretty interesting tale about a real-life
flood, but they are works of historical
fiction, drawing from the Holocaust and
the Louisville flood of 1937. It would have
been nice to see contemporary issues
dealt with in this manner.
THE intersection of comics and indie
rock in Brown’s work helps make
another point: not too many years
ago, creators and consumers of both art
forms had to work hard to find one another.
They had to rely on zines, little shops
and informal networks of like-minded
souls. Part of the pleasure of being a fan
was figuring out how to find new stuff.
Now, with the Internet and the professionalization
of the comics industry, it’s
blazingly easy to find new stuff, and a lot
of work that felt exceedingly important to
a certain subculture or another has been
thrust into the mainstream — or at least
closer to the mainstream — where it loses
its significance.
In addition to the large sampling of
auto biographical work, “The Best American
Comics” has two other main components:
there are the living legends, like
R. and Aline Crumb and Art Spiegelman
(Lynda Barry’s sweet, sensitive “Ernie
Pook’s Comeek” is a standout in this
batch), and also several strange, formally
ambitious creations by younger artists,
like the blocky, color-saturated panels
by Paper Rad and the off-kilter action
sequences by C. F.
I found myself drawn to this last group
of work, mostly because I couldn’t understand
much of it, and, O.K., I worried
whether this was a failing of mine or the
artists’. The editor of the collection, the
comic artist Chris Ware, aptly describes
them in his introduction as “disconcertingly
freeing.” In other words, they make
you wonder what a comic is, and in doing
that, they pull you ever farther away from
the real world.
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