Author: Andrew Wheeler

Will Eisner has a towering place in the modern comics field
– the premier awards in the field are named after him, and for good reason –
due both to his pioneering Spirit
newspaper insert from the ‘40s and ‘50s and to the graphic novels he started
creating in the late ‘70s, after a long hiatus from the field. And that puts
him in an enviable position, in that huge swaths of his work is in print much
of the time. But perhaps that isn’t
all that enviable, since it means that some, well, lesser work gets reprinted as well.

The three books below were brought back into print this year
by W.W. Norton as part of their large and growing Will Eisner Library; they’re
packaged handsomely and would fit well on the shelf along with other books in
that series. But these three titles also show some of Eisner’s most glaring
faults and problems, particularly the biggest issue: his unbreakable addiction
to the most obvious strains of melodrama.

A Family Matter
By Will Eisner
W.W. Norton, July 2009, $15.95

Norton’s cover for [[[A Family Matter]]]­ – originally published in 1998 by Kitchen Sink –
telegraphs the melodrama here, as a dumpy Eisner middle-aged woman bawls, her
hands clenched in front of her dramatically underlit face. (The clichéd pose is
to the negative, but, on the other hand, Eisner is one of the few major comics
artists willing and able to draw realistic, unattractive people regularly and
put them at the center of his stories. And since the majority of humanity is unattractive, it’s important to have artists who show
them as they are.)

The story is set in familiar Eisner territory: a rich patriarch
has been ailing for years, and is essentially unable to communicate now. But it’s
his ninetieth birthday, so the entire squabbling clan – and no one squabbles
like Eisner characters – must gather for the occasion and maneuver for position
in the old man’s good graces. There’s the ne’er-do-well son, the daughter who
married a successful man, another daughter whose husband isn’t quite as
successful, the downtrodden lawyer son (lawyers are always harried and
overworked in Eisner; always small storefront shysters rather than high-powered
white-shoe types), the artistic younger daughter, and a sprinkling of kids from
the next generation. Despite one cell phone, the story feels like it’s set in
the usual Eisner time and milieu – vaguely mid-‘50s, relatively prosperous but
with dark clouds, with domestic servants for middle-class people, and all the
women wearing dowdy dresses and aprons all the time (and probably have
whale-boned foundation garments underneath).

Eisner’s characters also talk a lot, explaining the plot,
their motivations, and dreams to each other – it’s a bit like a musical on
paper in that way, and has to be taken in a similar spirit, as a contrivance
that makes thoughts manifest. (Eisner doesn’t use captions in this story, and
was never much for thought balloons – his people say what they feel, no matter what.) But he’s also
rehashing three generations of family history here, much of it only alluded to
or mentioned once, so there’s a density in Family Matter which is uncommon in a graphic novel outside of the
work of Gilbert Hernandez. But, again, that’s the soap-operatic aspect of Family
Matter: there’s always another
complication, another skeleton in the closet, another grievance.

Family Matter is soapy and sometimes obvious, a comics version of
the mid-20^th century ethnic soap operas. (Though, thankfully, he’d
toned down his most over-the-top Borscht Belt Jewish material and the bold and
dotted E*M*P*H*A*S*I*S in
dialogue that he used so heavily earlier.) It will feel very old-fashioned and unusual
to readers used to the cool, deadpan modern independent comics scene. But
Eisner is wonderful with body language and character types, and his people
never lack for motivation, so books like this will continue to be of interest –
particularly to aspiring creators, who want to see the broad, obvious ways of
creating effects so that they can then work on making those ways more subtle
and quiet.

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Asterios Polyp
David Mazzucchelli
Pantheon, July 2009, $29.95

Comics are an essentially mongrel art, bred out of the
scraps of two prior art-forms in the great kennel of popular culture. That’s no
bad thing, despite what the mandarins might say – mongrels typically have the
strengths of both parents, without the fussiness and decadent weakness
characteristic of arts that only breed incestuously. Of course comics then are
called bastards, which is both a slander and absolute truth. The slander only stings
if one thinks being a bastard is a bad thing.

Asterios Polyp, for example, is a bastard, and the graphic
novel that bears his name is – and this is only one of the things it is, but we’ll start there – the story
of how he finally, much too late in his life, learns how not to be quite so
much of a bastard as he was before. We see Asterios in appropriately classical
form: both before and after his downfall, as if he’s both at once. More
importantly, though, [[[Asterios Polyp]]]
is the story of comics themselves, as it dramatizes the interplay of the
elements that come together to make up comics. Asterios is a renowned teaching architect:
serious, linear, dogmatic, didactic, Apollonian, a maker of dichotomies. And he
comes up against the Dionysian side of the world again and again, symbolically
ramming his axe-shaped head into the places where the world doesn’t fit his
categories, willing it into the forms he’s decided are right for it.

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George Sprott: 1894-1975
Seth
Drawn & Quarterly, May
2009, $24.95

Comics very, very rarely tell stories about old, fat, boring
men, which most people probably don’t think is a problem. But no art form can
ever become mature if it ignores large swaths of the world, and it’s
indisputable that our world is filled
with men who are old, or fat, or boring, or (even worse) all three at once.
Maybe none of us would ever want comics to be only about the Sprotts among us, but the fact that there’s
now room for comics about them is a good sign.

[[[George Sprott: 1894-1975]]] is an expanded version of a story that originally appeared from late 2006 through March of 2007 in single-page installments in the [[[New York Times Magazine’s]]] “Funny Pages” section. (Which, by the way, seems to have quietly ended with
Gene Luen Yang’s story “Prime Baby” a few months back.) In the Times serialization, each installment of Sprott was a single large page, essentially a chapter of
the longer work. Those pages appear here, in the same sequence and not apparently
changed, but they’re surrounded by new work – both Seth’s usually impeccable
(if chilly, and in his typical blue tones) book design, with illustrations and
decorations, and some new comics stories to expand that original story. Primary
among the new work is a sequence of eight stories – each one three pages long, and
each taking place on one particular day, in a different decade over Sprott’s
long life, arranged from 1906 through 1971 as the book goes on. There’s also an
impressive six-page fold-out, near the end of the book, that looks to depict
Sprott’s scattered thoughts as he died. On top of those, there are short
introductory and ending pieces: the first is thematically interesting, if
mostly wheel-spinning, while the new two-page “Sign Off” from the fictional TV station that Sprott worked for is another slab of very provincial Canadian
bacon added to a plate already swimming in maple flavoring and Timbits.

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All young comics protagonists are
special, even if they don’t know it yet. In manga in particular, they’re likely to protest loudly that
they’re just “a normal kid” and to squirm at the thought of being separable
from the vast thundering herd of undifferentiated humanity in the slightest
way. But it doesn’t matter what they say;
we see that they’re all uniquely wonderful — maybe special snowflakes, maybe
purple children. Maybe wizards! Maybe mutants! Maybe the feudal lord! Maybe the
rightful ruler of the entire world, and the dashing fated love of that gorgeous
other character, and, and, and EVERYTHING!

This week, I have three books like
that, with young people who are deeply, utterly special.

X-Men: Misfits, Vol. 1
Story by Raina Telgemeier and
Dave Roman; art by Anzu
Del Rey Manga, August 2009,
$12.99

Telgemeier and Roman take the
standard X-Men set-up – which is
already, in its full Claremontian flowering, completely full of adolescent
longing, fear, and obsession – and twist it about 90 degrees into the world of shojo. The characters come from all over the X-men universe,
with a plot germ from mid-Claremont Era: Kitty Pryde, young and conflicted
about her powers, is given a scholarship to Professor Xavier’s Academy for
Gifted Youngsters in Westchester.

And she finds herself the only
female student there. (Even the female professors are absent for most of this
volume, to intensify the reverse-harem feeling.) The other X-Men characters are
all familiar names, though they’re arbitrarily divided into teachers (Colossus,
Magneto, Storm, Marvel Girl, Beast) and oh-so-pretty boys (Iceman, Angel,
Forge, Havok, Cyclops, and so on). There’s the usual clique of privileged kids,
who are allowed to do what they want and essentially run the school, and of
course they are the prettiest boys and of course they are called The Hellfire
Club. (And of course Magneto is their mentor; Telgemeier and Roman are hitting
all of the X-Men/shojo parallels they can as hard as they can.)

Kitty is torn between the fast
heartless boys and the outcasts – in particular between Pyro (who becomes her
boyfriend) and Iceman (who is unfailingly cold to her, natch). Does she make a
big choice at the end of this book? Does she learn what really matters in life?
Is the Pope Catholic?

X-Men: Misfits is a solid reverse-harem shojo story, but I can’t help but believe that
it’s true audience is men and women of around my age – comics readers of
long-standing who know enough of the X-Men mythology (and I barely do) to
appreciate the changes that are being made to it. Anzu’s art is exactly what
you’d expect for this kind of story, though she does differentiate a large cast
(of mainly pretty, pretty boys – all the same kind of prettiness, too) clearly
and easily, which is not simple.

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