MAD Magazine

MAD Magazine;
R. Crumb
You can tell the graphic-novels section in bookstore from afar, by the young bodie sprawled around it like casualties of a localize disaster. There were about a dozen of them at th Barnes & Noble at Union Square one recen afternoon, in a broad aisle between graphic novel and poetry. Not one was reading poetry, but th proximity of the old ragged-right-margine medium piqued me. Graphic novels—pumped-u comics—are to many in their teens and twentie what poetry once was, before bare words lost thei cachet. The nineteen-sixties decided that poe types would thenceforth wield guitars; the eightie imposed percussive rhythm and rhyme; the two-thousands favor drawing pens. Like life-changin poetry of yore, graphic novels are a youn person’s art, demanding and rewarding menta flexibility and nervous stamina. Consuming them—toggling for hours between th incommensurable functions of reading an looking—is taxing. The difficulty of graphic novels limits their potentia audience, in contrast to the blissfully easeful, still all-conquering movies, but tha is not a debility; rather, it gives them the opalescent sheen of avant-gardism Avant-gardes are always cults of difficulty—Cubism, “The Waste Land”—b which a rising generation exploits its biological advantages, of animal health an superabundant brain cells, to confound the galling wisdom and demoralize th obnoxious sovereignty of age
Start with Chris Ware, the thirty-seven-year-old Chicagoan Picasso / Braque and young Eliot of graphic novels, whose “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” (2000, Pantheon) is, besides being viciously depressing, the first formal masterpiece of a medium that he has proved to be unexpectedly complex and fertile. Set aside, for now, the graphic novelists you probably most like, if you like only a few: Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, Daniel Clowes. Their peculiar literary qualities are distracting. The same goes for Robert Crumb, for whom there is the added problem of a historical significance: he is the father of art comics. Keep lightly in mind the ever-teeming regions of genre: superhero, action, horror, goth-girl. Give a respectful but wide berth to Japanese manga, which occupy most of the shelf space allotted to graphic novels in bookstores, their bindings as uniform as lined-up vials of generic, obviously addictive pharmaceuticals. Dutifully paging, right to left, through a score or so of translated manga, I register the buzz of platter-eyed characters engaged in well-designed, pointless violence. I pause at frames in which, amid suddenly silent ruins, some liquid or another drips with a sound that is invariably rendered plp plp plp. It’s not that styles of sheer sensation are contemptible, but once you’ve said “Wow,” you are close to having exhausted the subject. It is even a point of honor with action comics—as with action movies and action anything, like roller coasters—to leave us with only a suffusive, endorphin glow. As for the dizzying byways of shojo, kinky romance manga for girls, I throw up my hands in Caucasian senior-male bewilderment.

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“Jimmy Corriga ” tells of a potato-headed, hypersensiti e office worker—“a lonel , emotionally-impair d human castaway,” t e author terms him—w o lacks any notable person l resource except a limitle s capacity for ment l suffering. Sever l interlocking stories, ma y of which involve t e miserable eighteen-nineti s childhood of Jimmy s doppelgänger grandfathe , center on Jimmy’s fir t meeting, at the age f thirty-six, with his absent e father, a figure of crushi g banality. (Jimmy’s mothe , who lives in a retirement home, is a monster of self-absorption.) Ware’s visu l style recalls the clean-lined perfectionism of “Tintin,” the classic adventure str p by the Belgian Hergé (Georges Rémi, 1907-83), whose book-length stori s qualify as graphic novel avant la lettre, but it is far more varied in design, with densely rhythmic layouts of small and large panels and of close-up and long views, and it is subtler in color, with moody, volatile pastels. Ware exercises an encyclopedic command of literary and cinematic tactics—stream of consciousness, montage—with tropes that are peculiar to graphic art: often effects of stillness, such as a character’s blank takes, in which you sense mental wheels turning (never to any very propitious end, in this case), and landscapes and cityscapes infused with a droning dailiness. He speeds and slows time, stops it, and can even seem to run it backward, revisiting and revising recent events, or sideways, incorporating alternative accounts of what’s happening. All this is done with utmost precision. Reading “Jimmy Corrigan” is like operating an intricate machine whose function is not immediately apparent. Gradually, meanings emerge and emotions crystallize. None gladden. Let one gross example stand for the book’s innumerable bummers: Jimmy wanders outdoors, struggling to compose, in his mind, his first-ever letter to his father. (“Dear Dad, Hi! How are you? I’m your son . . .” “Dear Dad, Hi! My name is Jimmy. You might not remember me, but . . .”) A mail truck makes its rounds in the background. Jimmy sees deer behind a gas station across the street. After trying to remember whether deer bite, and assuring himself that they’re harmless, he steps toward them, happily. The mail truck hits him.
The masochistic tenor of “Jimmy Corrigan,” while extreme, is typical of serious graphic novels and, in fact, of most of the modern comic strips that influence graphic novelists, at least of the male kind. Comics heroines, from Little Orphan Annie to Wonder Woman, are as a rule resiliently upbeat, however beset. (In a preface to “Jimmy Corrigan,” Ware issues a questionnaire that’s meant to gauge the relative grimness of the reader’s childhood. It begins, “1. You are a. male. b. female. If b, you may stop . . .”) A painfully humiliated hero is essential even—or especially—to “Superman” and its vast spawn. Disregarded Clark Kent is the figure readers identify with; his transformation into the Man of Steel nurses the hopes and fulfills the rage of all underestimated boys, but it can’t cure his loneliness. “Spider-Man” twists the knife by making Peter Parker’s superpowers an added torment to him: he’d rather be an ordinary guy. The theme of a publicly misjudged character’s private anguish has grown, in comics history, to dominate the form. Who today still relishes the pure ridicule of “Li’l Abner,” or the convivial folk wisdom (brilliant wordplay aside) of “Pogo”? Both were immensely popular before the ascendance of “Peanuts,” the most important comic strip of the past half century. Charlie Brown is Clark Kent without the colorful underwear, and with all the possibly compensatory qualities split off and given to other characters, mainly Snoopy. Jimmy Corrigan, in turn, is Charlie Brown without the eternal childhood in an Arcadian neighborhood. Ware teases out a nightmarish aspect of “Peanuts” that Charles Schulz cushioned in whimsy: Charlie Brown is incorrigibly mediocre, incapable of satisfactory relationships or achievements, doomed to obloquy. His generous and trusting heart sets him up for mishap and betrayal—which, in his little four-panelled world, where nothing changes, he meets with a sigh. Jimmy’s world is big—Chicago’s Sears Tower looms in misty silhouette outside his window—and events in it have consequences. They give him nosebleeds. They make him cry.
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 “American Splendor” (2003), a movi based on comics that Pekar wrote and others drew. A jazz and comics buff blesse with a connoisseur’s taste and remarkable powers of persuasion, Pekar met Crum in Cleveland in the sixties and enlisted him to illustrate long, grumpy monologue that told the story of his shambling existence. (Desultory personal content in bravura visual form quickly became fashionable among younger artists, most of i quite bad.) Pekar has since dragooned several other cartoonists to his exquisitel tedious ends. The latest is Dean Haspiel, who performs with virtuoso flair in “Th Quitter” (2005, DC Comics/Vertigo), relaying Pekar’s confessions as a working-class dude who grew up with little in his favor except a knack for beating u other dudes. Pekar reviews the futilities of his life with humorless fixation an zero insight. He is the accidental minimalist of the graphic novel