HOLIDAY READING - COMICS

The Führer is on the loose in “I Killed Adolf Hitler,” left, by the Norwegian artist Jason, while the wordless “Fox Bunny Funny,” by Andy Hartzell, concerns desire, utopianism and socialization in a world populated by foxes and rabbits.
Review by DOUGLAS WOLK, New York Times, December 2, 2007

Cartooning is always subjective, so when you look at political comics, it’s useful to think about where their arguments can lie — not just in their words but in the implications of their visual style. If you were to read only Andrew Helfer’s text for RONALD REAGAN: A Graphic Biography (Hill & Wang, $16.95), for instance, it would seem to be a straightforward chronological trot through Reagan’s life story, with particular attention paid to the showmanship of his public persona and his weakness for self-serving fabrications. Most of the book’s spin, though, is actually in its artwork, by Steve Buccellato and Joe Staton. After an opening montage of notable moments from Reagan’s public life, which might as well have been sketched from publicity photos, “Ronald Reagan” becomes a catalog of the sorts of visual rhetoric cartoonists can pull off: nearly every panel incorporates some kind of broad caricature or symbolic distortion, usually at Reagan’s expense. On a single page, we see a smiling Reagan hobnobbing with three other Screen Actors Guild board members while Jane Wyman checks her watch; then Reagan and Wyman sweating, smiling and pushing away enormous tough guys with shirts labeled “Union”; then a quizzical Reagan (with a question mark over his head) watching a man with a fez and a hammer-and-sickle jacket whispering in someone’s ear; and finally the editorial-cartoon shorthand of an eagle and a bear standing on a broken swastika and scowling at each other.

That sort of visual ricocheting among multiple varieties of exaggeration and abstraction, combined with the time leaps required to squeeze Reagan’s career into 100 pages of comics, makes for disjointed storytelling, and there’s scarcely a panel here that leads directly to the next. Buccellato and Staton’s caricatures often resemble a rushed version of Mort Drucker’s movie parodies from MAD magazine; if Helfer’s words skewer Reagan at every opportunity, they don’t overtly burlesque him the way the pictures do. (Caption: “By the end of July, the budget and tax-cut portions of Reaganomics had become law, setting the stage for the Reagan administration’s ‘new beginning.’” Image: a beaming sun with a big, sarcastic smiley face on it, rising over the Capitol building.) Virtually all the dialogue in “Ronald Reagan” is drawn from the public record, and Helfer crams in a remarkable amount of information, but it’s the images that pass judgment.

The veteran underground cartoonist Sharon Rudahl, conversely, is unabashedly a fan of her new book’s subject and draws her with a reverent lightness of touch. A DANGEROUS WOMAN: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman (New Press, paper, $17.95) is largely based on “Living My Life,” by an even bigger Goldman buff: Goldman herself, the anarchist activist who spoke out on behalf of pretty much every revolutionary cause of her time and never missed an opportunity to come off like a martyred champion of the oppressed. Most of the text, Rudahl notes, is drawn from the writings of Goldman and her circle, although she seems to have added quite a few exclamation points herself (“It sounds like the awakening of the American worker!!”).
That’s somehow fitting, and so is Rudahl’s madly anarchic, hyperdramatic visual approach. Her images, executed in feathery line work with ink wash, drape all over one another. Faces and bodies are uniformly bulbous and wobbly. The sole consistent design element is Goldman’s hair, a bun-shaped mass of pointillist speckles. (Every page, distractingly, is signed by Rudahl with a little copyright notice.) The book briskly catalogs the particulars of Goldman’s life, lingering on only a few episodes, like Alexander Berkman’s failed 1892 attempt to assassinate the steel plant manager Henry Clay Frick and the 1920 visit to Russia that turned Goldman against Soviet Communism. For the most part, Rudahl represents scenes as they might have happened, although she throws in an occasional daffy gesture, like Karl Marx quotations coming from the mouths of the Marx Brothers. She sometimes grants herself a broader perspective than her subject’s, too: every time we see Goldman taking a new lover, the look on her face suggests her attention is wandering elsewhere, as if she’s already thinking about how to make her paramour part of her legend.

Rutu Modan’s EXIT WOUNDS (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95) isn’t directly concerned with politics, as such, but the political culture and social stratification of modern-day Israel are intimately connected to the emotional violence its characters inflict on one another. Numi, an Israeli soldier, contacts a young Tel Aviv taxi driver named Koby to tell him that an unidentified body from a suicide bombing may have been his long-absent father, Gabriel. This isn’t an official notification, though: Gabriel had been Numi’s lover, and she needs Koby’s help to find out if he really is dead or has simply abandoned her. As the two of them investigate Gabriel’s disappearance, everything Koby learns compounds the stack of lies that made up his father’s life. Ultimately, he finds himself in an impossible position, so fenced in by emotional violence that no course of action seems defensible or even prudent.
Modan helped found the Actus Tragicus collective of Israeli cartoonists, and the plot of her first graphic novel is shrewdly constructed, feinting at obvious twists (like the inevitable romance between the rich girl and the poor boy who’ve been bickering for most of the story) and then swerving away from them. But the real glory of “Exit Wounds” is Modan’s artwork. Her characters’ body language and facial expressions, rendered in the gestural “clear line” style of Hergé’s Tintin books, are so precisely observed, they practically tell the story by themselves. Numi, for instance, spends most of the story slouching a little, as if she’s trying to hide her height; you can tell she’s got her guard down when she straightens up. And Modan’s Israeli landscapes, colored in flat, solid tones, capture the look of the country with spare precision: a few fluid lines describe a dingy bus-station cafeteria or a scrubby beach, echoing the book’s treacherous interpersonal terrain, where everything and everyone has sustained collateral damage.

The single-named Norwegian cartoonist Jason’s dryly riotous I KILLED ADOLF HITLER (Fantagraphics, paper, $12.95) concerns the ultimate political act: changing the course of history, or trying to. Jason’s brief, whimsical graphic novels maintain a tone of deadpan stasis in the face of the most ludicrously over-the-top plot devices; last year’s “Left Bank Gang” was about the struggling cartoonists F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce deciding to pull a bank heist, and this one follows a hit man, exhausted by the day-to-day drudgery of his work, who is hired to take a time machine to 1938 and assassinate der Führer. (As always, Jason draws all of his characters with animal heads — rabbits, dogs, birds — and flat, blank facial expressions.)