Crumb’s Genesis, Part 2

Having said all this, even if only fans — all 300,000 million of them — buy The Book of Genesis Illustrated, they’ll be well rewarded. As Jessica Abel, co-author of Drawing Words & Writing Pictures and writer-illustrator of La Perdida, noted when she was in Kalamazoo, Michigan, this past November, Robert Crumb is a genius with every art medium he touches. Genesis Illustrated, which Crumb contends took five painful years to complete, is packed with his distinctive lettering, perfect composition of image as well as panels to the page, and, of course, his magnificent drawings themselves.

The characters are wild-eyed, lusty and rough. But they’d have to be, wouldn’t they, given the adventures and travails they undergo in these stories?

And if I’m not mistaken, doesn’t Eve look a lot like Crumb’s wife Aline? Crumb’s made no secret of his interests in strong women ….

You can listen to Crumb interviewed on the book on NPR’s Talk of the Nation here.

Lineage

I’m reminded of that Albert Einstein quote that I think is often misapplied: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Ad agencies tout it as a corporate motto for being clever. But while it’s true imagination can be the spark that generates great ideas, without knowledge you’re just playing with soggy matches.

In sequential art, we can see a direct line of informed artists building upon the work of their predecessors, to which they blend in their own imagination. See what I mean: Hugo Pratt (Corto Maltese is his internationally known protagonist) acknowledged his debt to comic-strip predecessors Noel Sickles (Scorchy Smith) and Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon). As Jaime Hernandez moved from very detailed illustrations to more impressionistic work in Love & Rockets, his heavy inks began to resemble Pratt’s — which of course in turn evoked the chiaroscuro of Caniff. And when Jessica Abel (La Perdida) visited Kalamazoo, Michigan, last week, she cited Hernandez as an early inspiration for her work.

So we can draw a link from Sickles and Caniff (starting in the 1930s) through Pratt (1970s to 1990s) to Hernandez (1980s up to today) to Abel (2000 and still going), to name just a few practitioners.

Another would be Frank Miller. (Now there’s a man who loves chiaroscuro — look at Sin City.) In his introduction to The Dark Knight Returns (1986), Miller writes that the notion to make his version of Robin a girl came from Love & Rockets.

And as readers of that dark, grim series also will recall, political and military tension mounts between the United States and the Soviet Union over the island of Corto Maltese ….

Jessica Abel in Kalamazoo, Part 2

“You have to grow up reading comics to want to make comics,” Jessica Abel told the audience last Wednesday, Nov. 04, at the Kalamazoo (Michigan) Public Library. And because girls historically didn’t read comics, there haven’t been very many women writing or drawing comics.

It used to be there were one in 300 women in the comics industry, Abel said in an offhand estimate. That had grown to about one in 30 when she started some 20 years ago. Abel guessed that figure today to be about one in three.

(I wonder if Abel has ever had this conversation with Amelia Rules creator Jimmy Gownley, who’s promoted comics for younger children, especially for girls ….)

Abel noted manga as “huge” for her students when she starting teaching comics at New York’s School of Visual Arts in the early ’00s. “It’s influence is now less pervasive,” she said, with what appeared to be a small sigh of gratitude.

She cited Jaime Hernandez’s Maggie and Hopey stories in Love & Rockets as a primary inspiration for her work. You can see a little Maggie and Hopey in Abel’s own major graphic novel, La Perdida — a character starts out “with a chip on her shoulder. Then something happens,” she said.

Abel confided she’s doing more writing than drawing these days. She is currently working on scripts for a character called Trish Trash, a roller-derby girl on Mars, among other projects, including a novel.

You can see my review of La Perdida posted Sept. 06, 2009, and of Hernandez’s Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories posted Oct. 14, 2009.

Jessica Abel in Kalamazoo, Part 1

Jessica Abel, who teaches comics at New York’s School of Visual Arts, believes comics shouldn’t be considered a visual art. It’s narrative art, she contends, and should be thought of — and taught — in the same category as film studies.

That whole idea of narrative was the key to her presentation Wednesday evening at the Kalamazoo (Michigan) Public Library, during which she critiqued, sometimes harshly, her own early work.

“When I started, I didn’t know what I was doing,” she told the audience (many of whom gripped sketch pads during the presentation). Her big problem was not the drawing, but that she didn’t know how to tell a story. The question of “What happens next” stumped her, she claimed.

It was while she was doing mini-comic Artbabe that a fellow cartoonist suggested to her that Archie comics, of all things, contained perfectly distilled stories. So Abel, a former writing major, began the first of several analyses of good story-telling. With Archie, it’s this basic: 1 Archie wants Veronica. 2 He meets an obstacle. 3 He finds a solution. 4 There are consequences. 5. There’s the concluding situation.

Abel’s quest for the perfect narrative evolved, through what she deemed the Three-Act Story Structure (set-up, conflict, resolution), to a more complex Narrative Arc, which she worked out while she wrote and drew La Perdida — a spark sets the protagonist’s life out of balance; the protagonist tries to settle the problem or question; moving on to a climax, in which that problem or question is definitely answered … or not answered.

Sometimes that “answer” is an internal epiphany, for the character or for the reader, Abel said.

She and her husband, Matt Madden, are working on a new version of their very helpful Drawing Words & Writing Pictures. (It helped me — I’d never heard of an Ames Lettering Guide before.)

See my review of La Perdida posted Sept. 06, 2009.

‘La Perdida’s’ Unreliable Narrator

The opening to Jessica Abel’s La Perdida, when Carla arrives in Mexico City, is all cluttered and rushed, with text boxes sometimes at both the tops and bottoms of the people-packed panels.

Abel is showing us the city’s own hectic life, with its taxis, vendors and mashers (“Hey, skinny! I’ll make you fatter!”). Once Carla gets inside her friend’s apartment, though, everything calms down. The drawing style remains scratchy, and heaven knows, these characters talk a lot. But the perspective remains hers.

That point of view demonstrates what any self-respecting English major would recognize as that of an unreliable narrator: Carla doesn’t realize what we the readers see, as well as what most everyone else in this graphic novel picks up on — even her practically anonymous neighbors figure out what’s going on before she does.

Her visit to Mexico City drifts from that of dizzy soap opera and having trouble paying the rent to one of a kidnapping and imminent danger. And Carla, the protagonist, not only doesn’t figure out what’s going on until it’s almost too late, but she’s oblivious to her own culpability in the action.

It’s a slow boil. Until the kidnap plot begins to unfold, the story is taken up with quick-to-take-offense Carla and her aimless friends drinking and doing drugs, and frankly none of them are particularly pleasant. The men in particular almost without exception come across as, well, dumb. It’s hard to be concerned about any of them once things turn violent and scary. (Just because they pull off a kidnapping doesn’t mean they’ve become any smarter or more interesting. They’re just more dangerous.)

But the cinematic drama of the final third of the book is truly effective. Carla, for all her self-centeredness, becomes a victim, too. Her final loss — her “perdida” — is moving. I guess all the more so for us being able to see what brought her to that point.

After all, the final passage of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, the tale of another unreliable narrator, only works because of all that’s come before.