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Stop Forgetting to Remember
By Peter Kuper
Crown Publishing, July 2007, $19.95
 

[[[Stop Forgetting to Remember]]] is the autobiography of “Walter Kurtz,” a fortysomething cartoonist born in Cleveland and resident in New York City, who worked on a strip about two color-coded spy-types for a satirical magazine popular with teen boys, and who otherwise has an immense amount in common with Peter Kuper. But he is not Peter Kuper – or, rather, he’s different enough from Kuper to provide any plausible deniability that might become necessary.

Kuper worked on [[[Stop Forgetting to Remember]]] for at least ten years, 1995-2005, and the final product is loose-limbed and discursive, a collection of autobiographical stories folded into the “present-day” obsessions and concerns of Kurtz. The present-day material is all in gray tones, with the flashbacks and similar imaginative scenes drawn in a maroon like a day-old bruise. Each chapter does make a connection between present and past, but Stop Forgetting reads like a collection of shorter biographical pieces rather than one graphic novel. (That ten-year span means the book isn’t quite the way either the 1995 Kuper or the 2005 Kuper would have made it. It ends up being loosely organized around the life of Kurtz’s daughter Elli, but it’s not about her; she’s just there, growing up, and her life gives Kurtz things to reminisce about.)

Prose novels sometimes show the signs of too much development time, but there it’s typically an overworked surface, like a miniature painting from an obsessive, with every tiny detail written and rewritten and re-rewritten until it’s completely airless and self-enclosing. By contrast, comics that have been worked on too long get disjointed; it’s much more difficult to rework a ten-year-old comics page than it is to rewrite a ten-year-old novel chapter, so the comics page gets a few tweaks or a new panel pasted on top where the prose chapter would get rewritten from beginning to end. Stop Forgetting to Remember has a mild case of this; there’s a sense that Kuper had an overarching idea for this book – or had more than one, at different times – but that idea doesn’t come through cleanly, so the book becomes a series of glimpses of a life.

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