Bill Gaines, Harvey Kurtzman

The influence of “Peanuts” pervades one variety of graphic novel, th influence of the early MAD magazine another. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan astutely called MAD, which first appeared in 1952, “a kind of newspaper mosaic of the ad as entertainment, and entertainment as a form of madness.” Bill Gaines, Harvey Kurtzman, and the magazine’s other inventors counterattacked the manipulative forms and messages of mass culture with a none too subtle parodic wit that was angry at its root. It fed a furious, slightly scared cynicism in its readers that was born of perceptions of falseness in advertising, certainly, and in perhaps, well, everything with which “they” presumed to know and affect our thoughts. What “they” imagined we must be like, to swallow it all, was caricatured in the sunnily moronic countenance of Alfred E. Neuman. MAD was almost as significant a cultural depth charge of the nineteen-fifties as Elvis was. (I came across my first issue in 1956 or so and immediately phoned two friends. All they heard on the line, before they hung up, was convulsive laughter.) Blending with the popularization of Beat literature and the comedy of Lenny Bruce, MAD’s attitude entered into the great generational joke of the sixties: feigned idiocy, faux innocence, the put-on, camp. (Cogito: people over thirty don’t get it, therefore I am.) Cartooning acquired a new, prevalently drug-enhanced function configuring madness as entertainment. Its new paragon—a writer-artist whose greatness still defies conventional description—was R. Crumb, who inaugurated “Zap Comix” in 1968 in San Francisco, at the center of a countercultural circus that was going rancid around the edges. Crumb regrounded comics in the experience of aging youths who, having embraced lives of antic alienation, were stuck with them.
Even full-on, Crumb’s drawings tend to have an up-from-under feel. The fat shoes of the striding character in his iconic “Keep on Truckin’ ” image suggest a ground-level viewpoint, as does the physiognomy of his feminine ideal: girlish above the waist, rolling thunder below. (His unedifying sexual penchants and frankly jerkish attitudes are inseparable from the truths he tells, unfortunately.) Crumb’s contributions to the physics of comics recall Giotto’s (yes, Giotto’s) to Western painting: acknowledging material mass and the force of gravity. In a Crumb, when something or someone falls the occasion doesn’t require a helpfully lettered “thud,” though he might provide one; feeling the weight, you register its impact. It’s a small matter of emphasis with big correlatives, ushering comics from stylized backgrounds for fantasy to projections of tactile space. The effect needn’t entail anything like realism. Its precedents include, in comics history, the topography of Coconino County, in George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” (1910-44). In that pocket immensity, as indifferent as the universe, a mouse might hit a cat with a brick, and a cat might enjoy it though a dog objects. After Crumb, a widespread rediscovery of Herriman became crucial to several styles of the nascent graphic novel, in particular that of Spiegelman’s “Maus” (1986, Pantheon). The Jewish mice, German cats, and Polish pigs of that extraordinary epic live their fates in surroundings that not only contain but witness and reflect on the action: the kitchen in which Spiegelman interviews his father, a setting of safety in the here and now, emotionally frames the all but unbelievable ghastliness of the there and then. To become novelistic, comics needed capacious structures of space and time in which their characters could come and go.
Graphic novels induce an enveloping kind of emotional identification tha makes them only too congenial to adolescent narcissism, in the writing n less than in the reading. Why arduously muster the persona of a Charlie Brown o a Jimmy Corrigan when your own fascinating self is right at hand? A problem fo the autobiographical graphic novel is that its author’s life experience may consis mainly in compulsive cartooning. But the trailblazer of this mode, Harvey Pekar is not a cartoonist at all, barely a writer, and well past adolescence, at leas chronologically. Pekar, a lumpish Cleveland file clerk, came to public notice i several appearances on the David Letterman show, in the mid-nineteen-eighties and was portrayed by Paul Giamatti in