The New Postmodern Comic

When most people think comic books, they think simple pictures and simple plots--big guys in leotards pounding one another while saying, "Feel the righteous sting of my unbridled fury!" After all, 80 percent of the estimated $1 billion U.S. comic book market is driven by testosterone in tights, secret identities and adolescent battles of good versus evil. Then there's the other 20 percent. In the rack that has held the pen-and-ink porn of Cherry or the aging hippie sedition of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, a new breed of illustrated mag--smart, gritty and literate--has reached adulthood. It's a fusion of art and literature: the post-modern comic.

The form hit new heights--in content and readership--when Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. The two books in the series recount Spiegelman's journey of understanding as his elderly father tells him about his survival in a Nazi concentration camp. But here the son and father are mice and the Nazis are cats: the ultimate Tom and Jerry cartoon. Spiegelman's autobiographical work is an extension of the sex-and-drugs underground comix of the late Sixties. The horrors of Auschwitz are juxtaposed with quirky encounters with his cranky father; an argument over wooden matches turns into a vaudeville routine.

In his collaborations with Sixties comic master R. Crumb, writer Harvey Pekar also pioneered the push into self-reflective realism. The American Splendor series chronicles the life of Pekar, a curmudgeon from Cleveland. David Letterman took notice, calling Pekar's existence one of "whining desperation," and Pekar began showing up as Dave's late-night sparring partner, later re-creating the Letterman appearances in his comic books. In 1994's Our Cancer Year, Pekar and his wife, Joyce Brabner, detail his battle with the disease. Our Cancer Year is available in a particularly wide range of bookstores, and not in the section where you'd find Garfield.

Meanwhile, Crumb--perhaps best known for drawing Mr. Natural--has tackled the work of Franz Kafka by illustrating his stories in Introducing Kafka. From his early work on Zap Comix and Fritz the Cat to today's explication of a mad Czech author, Crumb is an example of how times have changed--and how comics have changed with them: Introducing Kafka is a Cliff Notes for the postliterate generation. While Crumb's grotesque depiction of cockroach Gregor Samsa (from Metamorphosis) writhes across the page, Crumb and partner David Zane Mairowitz position Kafka as a product of his environment. They emphasize the humor of Kafka's absurdist despair and reconsider him as a Weimar-era Woody Allen. "What do I have in common with the Jews?" Kafka writes. "I don't even have anything in common with myself."

Although alternative comics have finally arrived, they still don't get respect. "They're the bastard children of both art and literature--neither side claims them, but their roots are in both of them," says Denis Kitchen, cartoonist and publisher of Kitchen Sink Press. "Pointy-head intellectuals in both camps think comics are beneath contempt."

Nonetheless, a new generation of talent is finding its voice in comics. Using pictures in the place of exposition, comic book confessionals--riding the success of Spiegelman and Crumb--have crowded the field. One noteworthy book is Wild Life, by writer and illustrator Peter Kuper. In it, Kuper recounts his not-so-suave youth, a series of false starts in a race to lose his virginity. Propositioned by a (text continued on page 134) Postmodern Comic(continued from page 80) willing teen beauty, Kuper's rabbit-eared alter ego gulps, breaks into a monster sweat and stammers, "I--I'll oblige you." Similar embarrassments inform Peep Show, an unflinching look at the life of artist Joe Matt. And slackers everywhere can relate to the all-too-real shirking of comic couch potato Buddy Bradley in Peter Bagge's Hate, or the post-teen angst found in Drawn & Quarterly's Optic Nerve, by 20-year-old Adrian Tomine. Women writers, also bitten by reality, are turning out comic reads: Twisted Sisters, for example, is Diane Noomin's anthology of cleverly caustic female views into the world of hormones and high heels. Not to be outdone, male writers have gotten in touch with their feminine sides: Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez' long-running classic Love and Rockets focuses on a group of chicas in the barrios of southern California; Why I Hate Saturn is Kyle Baker's story of a sisterly love-hate relationship.

The popularity of adult comics isn't limited to America. In Japan, Salaryman--that harried and hyperaggressive man in the gray flannel suit--is likely to read a comic book on the commute home. Japanese readers just can't get enough of comic "mooks" (short for magazine-books). And in France, comic books are referred to as the "ninth classification of art forms. French President François Mitterrand has even talked to the press about his favorite comics.

It's also easy to see twisted touches of alternative comics in the mainstream. The Simpsons, Ren & Stimpy and MTV's Liquid Television owe a debt to (and share some personnel with) their off-the-rack cousins. Evan Dorkin's violent duo, Milk and Cheese, have such cachet that the children on Roseanne wear Milk & Cheese T-shirts to show off their hip affinity for dairy products gone bad.

The most compelling relationship is between comics and movies. There are obvious lifts for the general audience--The Crow, the wildly successful The Mask and Tank Girl--but even such movies as Total Recall or Speed carry a strain of alternative psycho energy. In turn, it doesn't take much heavy lifting to imagine such filmmakers as Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch influencing New Wave noir writers who treat comic books as low-fi storyboards for mental movies that are too fantastic, violent or grim for Hollywood--or at least for the Hollywood of today.

Chief among the graphically inventive narratives is The Sandman, published by DC Comics' Vertigo line of adult-oriented titles. The Sandman is Morpheus, lord of dreams. In the course of one series, writer Neil Gaiman weaves together Norse, Greek and Japanese mythology, Egyptian religion and African rituals. The result: a liberal arts primer geared to a college audience. In one comic book panel Gaiman introduces playwrights Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare with a snippet of dialogue from a Marlowe play. No further identification. Norman Mailer has said, "Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time."

The Mystery Play, by Grant Morrison and Jon Muth, treads similar lofty--and cloudy--turf. Set during a town's re-creation of a medieval mystery play, Muth's graphic novel looks as if it were drawn by a cinematographer. When the actor playing God is murdered, a detective and a reporter set out to find the killer. More unabashedly bleak, Frank Miller's Sin City series takes Raymond Chandler and--yikes!--goes one up on the nihilism. His characters are classic movie archetypes: the whore with a heart of gold, the good girlfriend turned bad, the stoic hit man. But in Miller's work the hero--or antihero--usually ends up dead.

In today's 500-channel, remote-control entertainment universe, comic books serve as short attention span theater of the absurd. Call it low-tech CD-ROM--only rapid-fire images and surreal or disjointed narratives need apply. Charles Burns' stories, such as Blood Club and Curse of the Molemen, feature strange, stylized illustrations and eerie plots revolving around a boy named Big Baby. When Big Baby runs into space aliens beneath his neighbor's backyard, he greets their presence with a gee-whiz enthusiasm straight from B movies of the Fifties. Both Daniel Clowes' Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron and the Residents' Freak Show (a print partner to the group's CD-ROM) are populated with a claustrophobic array of eccentric and freakish characters--some of whom you might meet at Lollapalooza. Either book is perfect entertainment for the pierce-first-ask-questions-later crowd.

Ultimately, the success of these and other alternative comics will continue to affect the rest of the industry. In DC Comics' graphic novel Arkham Asylum, illustrated by Dave McKean and written by Grant Morrison, Batman, the venerable hero from our youth, travels to the edge of his sanity when he confronts criminal psychotics running their own asylum. The lush artwork seems as if it's refracted through a whacked-out prism. Even the Joker undergoes a revisionist slant. He is no longer the clown prince of crime in whiteface, but a leering, incoherent nut job. The twisted thing is, he makes more sense to today's audience than his traditional forebear ever could. This is not your father's Joker. And these are definitely not your father's comics.