Stuck Rubber Baby at 20

Before 1995, Howard Cruse was best known as an underground comix artist, first coming to prominence with Barefootz in the 1970s, with his editorship of Gay Comix in the early 1980s, and then hitting a real stride with the Wendel comics in The Advocate throughout the '80s. Wendel ended in 1989, though, and Cruse began a major new project, his first graphic novel, Stuck Rubber Baby, released by the DC Comics imprint Paradox Press. It gained notice and won awards, but never had the breakout success of something like Maus, Persepolis, or Fun Home, though I would argue that it is at least close to equal in merit.

Stuck Rubber Baby is a true graphic novel — unlike many other books that get that label, it was not conceived in pieces or published serially; it was always intended to be a long, unified narrative. It tells the story of a man named Toland Polk, mostly through his memories of growing up in Alabama during the early 1960s as a white guy who doesn't really know what he wants from the world or his life, coming to grips both with the civil rights movement and his own homosexuality. Partly in an attempt to try to cure his gay desires, he ends up in a relationship with a fiery college student, activist, and singer named Ginger, and she becomes pregnant. Meanwhile, protests against segregation and racism are growing more and more ferocious, and the white establishment fights back, with tragic, horrifying results. Throughout it all, Toland meets queer characters of various races and ages, and finally decides both that political action is necessary and that he can't pretend to be heterosexual any longer. This primary story is framed as the memories of Toland thirty years later, apparently in a stable relationship with a man, living a solidly bourgeois urban gay life, but still haunted by the past. Other characters' stories and fates are woven through Toland's memories, creating a complex view of this past and his remembering of it.

I've had a weird relationship with Stuck Rubber Baby over the course of its lifetime: I looked through it when it was first published and decided it wasn't for me; I read the whole book sometimes in the early 2000's and liked it but didn't really engage with it; I recently read it very carefully and closely, which led to something like awe. (The last time I had as powerful a reading experience was when I read J.M. Ledgard's Submergence over a year ago.)

Written Words on Wordless Ward

I remember when I spoke with Lynd Ward’s two daughters that both Nanda and Robin told me that they constantly asked their father what his wordless books meant and Lynd always replied with the same answer: "It means exactly what you think it means." And that is really the attraction of these books -- we bring so much of our own personal experiences to reading pictures because the language of pictures has, what I like to call, a "private declension" that only each of us can understand -- a secret smirk or a haunting remembrance from our private association to an image.

--David A. Beronä

The release of The Library of America's gorgeous two-volume collection of Lynd Ward's wordless novels has led to some fascinating and thoughtful reviews. I just noticed that Scott Esposito did a quick roundup, and so I thought I'd add to what he'd collected, since I find Ward's work endlessly fascinating.

William T. Vollmann, Bookforum:

What makes a Ward picture Wardian is its intuitive, partially spontaneous quality, which shines through increasingly if you scan the six novels in chronological order. At the beginning they look very much like the woodcuts they are, with all of that medium's chiseled constraint. In time, they come to resemble lithographs. The lines grow more fluid, the shapes more volumetric.

John Lingan, The Quarterly Conversation:

One reason why Ward’s novels are so uniquely powerful and engrossing is that their plots and messages are in perfect alignment with the obvious “battle of wills” that it took to make them. Particularly from Wild Pilgrimage, his third novel, onward, you can nearly see the artist’s triceps tensing to carve the stunning cross-hatch patterns that grant his wordless panels such physical and emotional depth. You can perceive the immense, sustained concentration that it took to imagine entire narratives and a motionless means of animating them, as well as the sweat-inducing balance of physical pressure and painterly delicateness necessary to displace little spools of wood shavings in search of a precise facial expression or shoulder slump.

Steven Heller, The New York Times:

I was a young art director for the Op-Ed page of this newspaper when I first read “Gods’ Man” and “Wild Pilgrimage.” In addition to commissioning illustrations, I sometimes used existing artwork by the likes of Francisco de Goya, Thomas Nast, George Grosz and other strong black-and-white conceptualists. Ward joined their ranks. Every image he made had its own integrity. On at least three occasions I took an engraving from the books and paired it with an Op-Ed article — a perfect marriage of text and image. But this was heresy. Ward’s images were designed to be seen in their original contexts, not forced to illuminate arguments that Ward never heard. For the experience of seeing all his wordless books as they were meant to be read, the Library of America set is essential.

Glen Weldon, NPR:

Ward's metaphors are simple, even stark, and he eagerly and unself-consciously commits to them; his most striking images possess an expansive — and occasionally swoony — operatic vigor. Which is why these novels attain the primal, Manichaean impact they do. Collectively, they exist on the line separating the dramatic from the melodramatic, sentiment from sentimentality.

Madeleine Schwartz, The New Yorker.com:

In his introduction to the books, Art Spiegelman comments on the difficulty of interpreting Ward’s "silent" novels. "Rarely was silent film—a direct catalyst for the wordless block—ever as resolutely mute as the woodcut novel; intertitles and musical accompaniment helped transmit its meanings," he writes. But Ward also had a genius for carving human movement, and watching his characters walk through their story lines is a particular joy of his novels. In "Prelude to a Million Years," an artist wanders through the city before his studio burns down (with him inside); in "Wild Pilgrimage," a worker lives a dream sequence in a series of red-and-white prints.

Sarah Boxer, Slate:

Ward's simultaneous love of books and distrust of language is, I think, what makes him historically important. He's the crucial missing link between the graphic novelists of today, Spiegelman included, and the narrative artists of the past, going back to Frans Masereel, Albrecht Dürer, and the muralists who painted Bible stories on church walls in case people couldn't read. 

There's also a long and fascinating piece on Ward in the latest issue of Harper's, but the online version is currently ensconced behind the paywall, available only to subscribers.

The Horror! The Comics!

The Center for Cartoon Studies' Schulz Library has a great blog, which, if you're at all interested in comics or graphic novels, provides wonderful reading.

Today, for instance, they posted a marvelous piece by S.R. Bissette about a new anthology of 1950s horror comics.  This is part one of what looks to be a three-part series.

I also just discovered Bissette's own site, itself a marvel.  Don't miss his series of posts on LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's Dutchman.

Sandman Meditations: "Dream a Little Dream of Me"

My latest "Sandman Meditations" column has now been posted at Gestalt Mash.  This particular column seems transitional to me, bringing myself as a reader to the foreground, because sometimes that feels necessary; the next installment goes in the opposite direction to some extent, and I expect as the experiment continues I'll be trying out different modes of narration, simply because doing all 75 or so of them in the same way would get rather tedious for all of us...

Here's an excerpt:

The third Sandman poses some problems for me, someone who has read almost no DC comics and has only the vaguest sense of their characters and history. The vagueness and sense share a source: popular culture in general. You’d have to live in some remote part of the world, away from billboards and newspapers and televisions and radios, to avoid all references to DC characters, given how many of them have metamorphosed into stars of movies and TV shows. I was going to write a sentence in which I listed them, but then I realized I don’t know how many of the characters I’m thinking of are DC characters.  Many, I’m sure, are Marvel characters. In fact, I probably have a greater sense of Marvel characters than DC characters, because the only comic I read as a kid was G.I. Joe, and that was a Marvel comic, so there were ads in it for other Marvel comics. At least, I think it was a Marvel comic.  

continue reading...

Sandman Meditations: "Imperfect Hosts"

My second Sandman Meditations column is now live at Gestalt Mash, this one looking at the second story, "Imperfect Hosts", and considering, among other things, the place of speech and thought balloons.

Sandman Meditations

Jay Tomio has started a new website, mostly (but not only) devoted to comics, called Gestalt Mash, and he very kindly asked me to be a regular contributor. When he first asked, I thought he must have me confused with somebody else, because though I have some good friends who are comics experts, I'm only an occasional reader of them myself. The only comic I read regularly as a kid was G.I. Joe, and I didn't read my first graphic novel until I was well into my 20's. Jay asked if I'd write about Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, writing a short essay for every issue. I told him, with a bit of embarrassment, that I've never read Sandman; indeed, I only know Neil Gaiman's work in prose (and like some of it quite a bit). Jay said that would be the fun -- plenty of comics afficionados have written about Sandman ... but what happens when somebody who doesn't know much about comics does?

Well, the first of my "Sandman Meditations" has now been posted, and you can see for yourself. This is just the beginning of a journey, and who knows what it will all look like in the end. It's intimidating to write from a position of naivety about a work of art that is so beloved by so many people, but it's also a challenge that offers some interesting opportunities, and I hope to explore different ways of writing about the series as I go along.

We're planning on posting a new piece every 7-10 days, which means this endeavor will take at least a year and a half to complete. Let the journey begin...

A Conversation with David Beronä

Over at Colleen Lindsay's digs, The Swivet, I interview David Beronä, who wrote a marvelous book called Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels.

One fun bit of trivia I forgot to mention in the intro to the interview -- before David and I had any knowledge of each other, we were both reviewers for Rain Taxi, and you should definitely check out his review there of one of the most recent wordless books to gain a lot of attention, Shaun Tan's The Arrival.