SUBSPECIES: Proselytes
by Benjamin Russell

There has been a lot of talk about the fact that comic books need to break out into a wider audience. The reason why comics are such a marginalized medium has been discussed at length, and I don't feel the need to recap here.

One of the proposed solutions to this problem is to change people's perceptions of comic books by introducing discerning individuals to some of the finest examples of Graphic Literature out there. This idea is designed to prove that comics consist of more than THE UNCANNY X MEN or HAGAR THE HORRIBLE. Public perception of comics has been, many say, it's own worst enemy, but if people were exposed to the best that's out there, they too would realize the potential of the medium and embrace it with the sort of addicted desperation that current readers are all the poster children of.

People are always evangelical about their addictions, and I am no exception. So to test the above theory, I decided to become a comics proselyte, and I handed out copies of some of the most First Time Reader-accessible comics that I could find that I thought would suit the characters and temperament of the individual recipients. As it is the gift-giving season, and a great many people might think that this would be an optimum time to cultivate new readers, I thought I’d share my findings.

WHY I HATE SATURN, by Kyle Baker.

Long held to be a sterling example of high-quality graphic literature that could appeal to someone largely unfamiliar with the comics industry, WHY I HATE SATURN is the story of Anne, a columnist who has to deal with the variances of an unhappy lovelife and poor self-image while also trying to live with her sister, a passionate environmentalist who believes she is from the planet Saturn.

With a complete absence of superheroes -- although Laura does wear a form-fitting outfit when she is in her uniform as a Queen of the Leather Astro-Girls of Saturn -- and word balloons, the books is mostly comprised of extraordinarily cutting, hilarious dialogue about the foibles of the dating scene, gender double-standards, and populist trends. When it comes to plot, the book suffers a little, and the story is oddly paced and a little jumpy. This is to be excused because of the humor -- humor books always let character and story suffer a little in order to get some more gags in, it's the nature of the beast.

WHY I HATE SATURN was given to Nalyn, then a junior at Wellesley College. She found it to be amusing -- particularly the rendering of facial expressions of the characters -- and generally a fun read. She was somewhat surprised at the adult content of the book, expecting it to be a superhero satire, aimed more at kids, due to the cover image of what "looked like a super hero cleaning up after a dead person or something."

A comic novice, Nalyn states that she has seen "all kinds" of comic books, but tells me that what she refers to as "her comic book phase" consisted of buying all of the CALVIN & HOBBES books in middle school, "and then not really anything since." She closes with the final damning statement about the possibility of reading other comics or graphic novels in the future: "I don't read enough in general, so I don't know if I would spend my free time reading comics as opposed to literature... If I am in the mood for an easy read, I'd probably think of getting a comic book before a trashy novel of some sort..."

SPARKS: AN URBAN FAIRY TALE, by Lawrence Marvit

SPARKS is the story of a young woman and a robot pieced together from car parts and a Speak & Spell. The being was originally just a scarecrow sculpture built to represent "the perfect man" in the mind of Jo, the main character. It’s subsequent animation and the slow process of it learning about the world and how it works is part of the story, but not the most important part. The part that really hooks the reader is not fantastic in nature, but real. Jo, and her relationships, her preoccupations, her feelings of isolation, and her complex history all feel very real. They are nuanced and unusual, and yet finely-crafted and personally evocative. The robot is a comfortable escape hatch for Jo -- and the reader -- to turn to when the real world ultimately fails to provide resolution. But the emotional truth of the real world, as portrayed by creator Lawrence Mavrit, is undeniable.

Dina, an educator working in Oakland, explained while she had been exposed to many comics through friends and boyfriends in the past, that she couldn't recall having read a comic since she read MAUS in middle school. She mentioned that one of the reasons why she had never gotten into the habit of reading comics was that there is "too much on a page." SPARKS, however, "was better than most" with "slick" artwork. But unlike the comic community's critical response to the book, Dina did not find herself warming up to the unusual nature of the lead character. It would perhaps be fair to say that the character is not terribly unusual outside of the comic genre. Instead, while Dina described Jo as effective, a paring down to the essence of what a Cinderella heroine should be like in a modern adaptation, she still described the comics as basically "fantasy, hero/adventure type stuff..."

SPARKS, while certainly fantastic in nature, is a far cry from an adventure story. Yet the assumption on her part that the majority of comics do incorporate elements from the adventure genre -- hardly an inaccurate assumption -- created parallels that didn't exist, and helped reinforce the concept of comics as genre literature. In the end, she also said that she would choose to read literature before picking up another comic, if given the choice.

JUNGLE BOOK STORIES, adapted for comics by P.Craig Russell

What about a comic book that was based upon source material that the reader might be familiar with? Is it possible that the knowledge that the story and characters were literary, part of a greater, respectable canon might encourage a person to both pay more attention to the validity of the work, but also not need to pay as much attention to the story, as it might already be familiar?

I grabbed a copy of P.Craig Russell’s JUNGLE BOOK STORIES ...

Komal is a junior at Harvard College, with a passion for molecular biology, and a contagious energy for all that strikes her fancy. If there was anyone who could spread the joy of graphic literature, this woman could make it as appealing as hot cocoa after three hours of ice skating. I had hopes that Russell’s elegant line work and attention to detail would please her keen aesthetic sense, but also found I was lucky in that she actually was familiar with the story. It is fairly unusual to find someone had even attempted to read the original version of "The Jungle Book, Vol. 1" since Kipling’s biases have brought him into literary disrepute.

My plan backfired, as Komal expressed that she missed Kipling’s stylistic wit and commentary, as Russell had pared the stories down to the basic storyline and the some hints ate the politics and balance of power between species in the jungle. She also felt that Russell’s clean line work gave the art a dark, morose quality, and yet simultaneously a kinetic, "electric" quality that she appreciated. The tone of the stories seemed much more serious because of Russell’s pictures, but even this didn’t jive with her memory of the tales.

But in the end, she decided that she’d prefer to "move on to more significant things."

THE COWBOY WALLY SHOW, by Kyle Baker

Katherine, now teaching English in Phoenix, Arizona, wrote her senior thesis at Harvard on the viability of the cowboy novel as literature, and how it may have had an impact on the writing of literary luminaries, the likes of which include William Faulkner. The connection between her cowboy novels and the title of THE COWBOY WALLY SHOW is a minor gag -- she promised to include a mention of the novel in her thesis somehow -- but the assumption was that as a literature major she would appreciate the section of COWBOY WALLY that has to do with the filming of HAMLET.

THE COWBOY WALLY SHOW has a fascinating format. It begins as a television documentary about television and film star Cowboy Wally, but the this "storyline" seems to be mostly there in order to allow Baker to have a vehicle for his many, many one-liner gags. This structure allows him to string all of the jokes in a row with only a few panels of set-up in between each one. It is marvelously funny. The book then focuses on Wally's two film projects. The first a Foreign Legion Man picture about the terrors of masculinity and a little bit about the horror of war, and the second is "Hamlet" -- filmed while in jail. Hilarity ensues.

Katherine has not, as of this writing, yet read THE COWBOY WALLY SHOW.

CONCRETE: FRAGILE CREATURE, by Paul Chadwick

FRAGILE CREATURE is my favorite Concrete story, and the one I read first. I thought long and hard about whether this was the best introductory storyline for the uninitiated. I don't believe that it is... The secondary story about Maureen's relationship with a research scientist might seem distracting to a new reader, if one was unfamiliar with her character. But the primary story is about Concrete offscreen on a film set, and I felt that someone who was knowledgeable in the dramatic arts might appreciate the realism that Chadwick brought to the story -- primarily from his own experiences working on films.

CONCRETE is always about the practicalities of the fantastic nature of its eponymous protagonist. And if you have an enormous, superhumanly strong creature living in California, sooner or later Hollywood is going to come knocking. The great concept is not that they want Concrete as a star, but as a special effect: it is far more efficient to pay a single person to lift a car and throw it than it is to hire a team of crane operators and technicians to hoist a car and film it at 64 frames a second moving in reverse. Concrete just might be able to save a B-movie from going over budget.

Rebecca graduated from Skidmore College with a degree in Music, having investigated avenues of performance in dance, musical theatre, and opera. She has stood on center stage, and she has painted flats, and she has done just about everything in between. A comic book that incorporated the details and machinations of show business into its plot and it scenery might appeal to her, I thought. Apparently, I thought incorrectly, as she has never read the book.

SIGNAL TO NOISE, by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

The only person who had previously read comics was my friend Elaine, a graduate student at Yale. She and I had compared notes over THE SANDMAN years before, and so I picked her up a copy of SIGNAL TO NOISE, the marvelous, overwrought story of a man making a film about the coming of the last Millennium and how the people of 999 Anno Domini dealt with it.

She waited five days, and then devoured the book and wrote me the following:

I just finished Signal to Noise. I was waiting to read it, until I was ready. Wow. Thanks.

I was annoyed, at just a few parts. To write like James Joyce and then write the sentence, "Artsy stuff," it gets on my nerves, I'm around too many people who show off their inscrutability, I'm here in the ivory tower from whence deconstructionalism was brought to the US, I think it's too easy to be inscrutable. But then again, I did just quote Foucault just this afternoon, and I did just write from whence. I'm not innocent of inscrutability. Sometimes being inscrutable is the only way to be true.

And that page with the bright white light, the double-page, when he dies.
It was hard for me to turn that page. It was a very good book.

Thank you.

And she has never purchased an additional comic book in the year since I presented her with this book that pleased her so much.

 

Benjamin Russell, while the Columns Editor for Popimage, bears nothing in common with Anne's column editor in WHY I HATE SATURN. Especially not the beard.


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