Why Rutu Modan Matters

Here's the reason I still read graphic novels, Rutu Modan's The Property.

The term, "graphic novel" is evidently almost as old as I am.  That half century however doesn't really describe much.  I don't remember hearing the phrase  until around the time of Art Spiegelman's Maus, or maybe when Alan Moore's The Watchmen appeared in hardcovers -- say, late Eighties, or early Nineties.  Spiegelman's may have been the first graphic novel I remember being described as such by mainstream reviewers and the general public.  It has really only been since the turn of this century that I've seen graphic novels become a category in general bookstores.

I dislike the term as it is now used; to mean any damned picture book presumably intended for adults.  (There is of course now a sub-genre of kids' graphic novels, like Jeff Smith's Bone, but let that pass.)  But what if not "graphic novel"?  The recent reissue of Lynn Ward's wordless novels by The Library of America reminds us that, indeed, there is nothing new under the sun. That's ancestry though, not a very useful name for the contemporary form, usually.  Will Eisner's A Contract With God, from 1978 (and later reissued) is widely considered to be the first graphic novel of the modern era.  I've read it, enjoyed it, but even here; it's a collection of short stories, not a novel.   It isn't told in chapters but in "issues," originally each was presumably an individual comic book, and each is a discrete story -- related by setting and period, etc. but, still not a novel.  It has the seriousness of theme, and the ambition in both the writing and the graphics, to deserve something better than the term "comic book," already a misnomer, but not perhaps this modern hippogriff, "graphic novel."

Seems we're stuck with it now, so graphic novel it is.

I've been reading this stuff for a long time now.  I enjoy it, the best of it anyway.  I must say, however that for every Fun Home or Louis Riel, there has been, a lot, and I do mean a lot, of just -- stuff.  Not every story benefits from a pictorial telling.  Not every literary classic requires a retelling in comics.  Not every cartoonist is meant to take on a longer, narrative form.  Not every sketchbook needs to be made into a book.  That said, I also think we are lucky enough to be living in something of a golden age.  So many really beautiful, and interesting graphic narratives!  So many genuinely good books. 

I don't mean to review the whole history of the form. Honestly I don't.  The subject tends to get me a bit exercised, is all.  As a fan, I do get frustrated by all the bad or indifferent stuff being published as graphic novels. More to the point just here, not in the whole length of my adult reading life have I seen a more consistently and absurdly inflated criticism than that with which graphic novels, and comics in general have increasingly come to be encumbered. What a lot of bullshit of late has been wrapped in the funny papers!

I hesitate to contribute to the pile.

And then, a graphic novel so superb appears unexpectedly among the new arrivals, and I forget my impatience with all the pretension and inanity on the subject now cluttering up scholarship and the Internet and the Arty Comics section at the bookstore where I work, and I just want to spread the good word.

Rutu Modan's first graphic novel, War Wounds, won the 2008 Eisner Award.  (Joe Sacco was a big fan too.)  It's the story of two unlikely allies: a Tel Aviv cabdriver and his father's Israeli army girlfriend, investigating the father's disappearance and possible death in a bombing at a train station.  It deserved the award.  The mystery was compelling, the characters and their relationship was believable and poignant, and both the narrative and setting were handled with a rich but beautifully restrained taste all too uncommon to the form.  I loved it.

Other than a few things in anthologies, it was the only example of Modan's work I'd ever read, until the publication last year of The Property, by Drawn and Quarterly.

Modan's story this time also has a reassuring reality to it, as well as a central mystery, though this time the mood is more reflective and less frantic.  A young woman accompanies her grandmother to Poland to reclaim the titular property the family lost in the War. Again, there is a love story here, two in fact, one clouded with both nostalgia and regret, the other also, in a complimentary way complicated by history.

History, in many senses being the inevitable preoccupation of both the characters and their author here, this book, even more than the last, has a richness of reference rare in graphic narratives.  This is not an artist just writing about being an artist; this is not a woman who only looks up from her work to maybe glance out of a studio window.  Place is real.  Her characters travel, not just literally through her story, on foot or in a taxicab, a plane or a tour-bus,  but across fully realized space, as well as through time and memory.  These characters are not, as so many, less mature, more confessional graphic memoirs for instance can feel, immune to external realities like weather, money, a head-cold, but neither is this the kind of digressive meditation that justifies slack story-telling as more "real" for being all but incidental to the artistic enterprise.

Modan's graphic style can be incredibly detailed, particularly in grounding her scenes in what looks and feels like a very particular space and architecture, and she obviously understands how much can be communicated in framing the information and the emotion she wishes to convey.  The effect is obviously cinematic, but nonetheless charmingly drawn for that.

The artist also understands, and quite impishly plays with the irrelevance of words to much of the story she's telling.  The confusions of conducting a conversation for example, and a flirtation, however imperfectly in more than one language offers an opportunity to a certain wry comment on not just the events described, but also on the conventions of cartooning.

The pages above are also representative of the brilliant discrimination of the artist's line and color.  The faces have more than a suggestion of Herge's Tin Tin about them.  And not unlike that master of his craft, just look how much information and emotion she can show, how efficiently she covers exposition and mood in the deceptively simple telegraphy of features reduced (and amplified) into just half a dozen dots and dashes. Note the sophistication of her semaphore of warm colors and a foregrounded conversation to say everything her characters can't.

This is not only a visual narrative of a real sophistication, but also something far more rare in a graphic novel, genuine humanity and honest emotion.

What makes Rutu Modan's work so satisfying to a man who has spent a substantial part of his adult life reading serious literature -- a term that should not be translated to mean dull novels -- is that, like many of the best contemporary graphic novels, Rutu Modan's work is not yet another exercise in graphic reference.  I am reminded of earlier comics artists, but this is not a comic book.  In large part, this is because, unlike the great master, Herge, Modan's work is not of necessity confined to telling adventure stories for children.  For all the astonishment and delight still to be discovered in the pages of Tin Tin, the adult reader, if he or she is being honest, must sooner or later admit to at least a grudging acknowledgement that as literature, and as humor Herge's books never grew up.  There's a great charm to that, and a certain boredom as well.  Clearly, here is a contemporary artist interested in more adult preoccupations, by which I obviously do not just mean sex and relationships.  Modan's characters are presented in relation not just to one another, as I've already said, but to history, religion, politics, geography, and yes, the means and the need of storytelling.

I can't remember the last time I read a graphic novel this satisfying on so many levels, or one with page after page, panel after panel crowded with such depth of feeling, and such memorable, and artful poise.

Dr. Longjohn at the Movies

I'm not such a fan of der ubermensch in tights, at least not as literature. As a kid, I read super hero comic books, as I should think did every other American boy of my generation. I enjoyed them, I'm sure, though I had neither the inclination nor the means to be a real fan or collector. (Pity that, because as I understand it, I was then living in the "Silver Age," though I was blissfully unaware of any such thing, and evidently might have made my fortune.) I should think my interest in super heroes waned at about the same time I ceased to enjoy Pixy Stix, wax lips and candy cigarettes. I don't remember. I do remember thinking Christopher Reeves a charming Superman. After that, there was, for me, a bit a lull. But of course by then, I'd discovered magazines with real naked men in them, among other adult distractions. Now of course comic books have become art form and super heroes are again not only box-office, but the protagonists in "novels." Well, well.

No one would go see the "Watchmen" movie with me. I was not surprised that A. was disinterested. He enjoyed the new "Batman" movies. We agreed the second one was really quite extraordinarily good for what it was. He would not however watch "Ironman" even though he likes Robert Downey Jr. just fine. (I enjoyed it.) But I was surprised that no one else I mentioned "Watchmen" to expressed the least interest. Finally, it came to our local second-run movie house, the admirably down-market Admiral Theater, where the popcorn is cheap and plentiful, the theater cavernous and cold and where, on a Monday afternoon, I did indeed watch "Watchmen" quite alone.

I admit I knew nothing of the original comic books until the hype for the movie started up. A year ago, I did a display table for the bookstore on comix, featuring some of the wonderful Fantagraphics collections of classic comic strips, new graphic novels and memoirs, manga and the like. In the bookstore there is a clear distinction made between the "graphic novels," and the history of comix, which live in the Art Section, and super heroes and manga which live upstairs with the Science Fiction/Fantasy books. I asked advice of the expert upstairs about what to bring down for the table-display and the first thing I was handed was Watchmen, created by writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins. I admit I'd never so much as looked at the book, though I'd certainly heard of Alan Moore. I'd seen the not very good movies made of his earlier books, From Hell and V for Vendetta, and then read the comic books. I'd also read at least one of his collections of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, though I could watch only a few minutes of the exceptionally bad film made of that last. Of all the Alan Moore I'd read before I read Watchmen, his Jack the Ripper story seemed the best, a clever combination of rather hammy agitprop and loopy conspiracy horror. Watchmen, when I finally read it, summarized for me all that was entertaining, and distasteful not just in Moore's writing, but in the whole Super Hero genre. I was glad I'd read it. I enjoyed it. It did however reinforce my established prejudices.

Seeing the movie made from it reminded me what a mess the various plots and subplots had been in the book. I can't imagine anyone who hasn't read the book making the least sense out of the movie, which I understand was the critical consensus on it as well, and may help to explain the movie's failure to become quite the blockbuster it was clearly intended to be. Like Moore's earlier comic books, Watchmen is a portmanteau into which is crammed a great deal of genuine fun, much of it though, it must be said, coming from the illustrators whose surprisingly reverent and nostalgic recreation of older styles of rather boxy, hard-lined drawing and heavy colors becomes almost touching, particularly in the flashbacks to the early days of heroes in saggy-assed uniforms and heroines in cheesecake heels. The multiple story-lines, flash-forwards and flashbacks, and the tongue-in-cheek introduction of the unrelated pirate comic, added some interest to the book, and again, Moore's penchant for juvenile, even rather endearingly clumsy pop satire was fun. Some of the latter survived in the movie, though if anything, made even more muddled-headed than Moore's more complicated original. But what was rather sweetly silly in the original illustration was made insipidly silly when actual actresses had to walk around in Betty Page shoes and a grown man had to try to appear heroic, for instance, dressed as a hooty owl or, most hilariously, if briefly, some poor anonymous soul had to convincingly menace in a blind executioner's hood with a heavy, decorative noose worn 'round his neck like a threadbare fox-fur.

What was worst, in both movie and the comic book, was the never quite admitted absurdity of trying to critique and even spoof, in a rather solemn way, the inherent gangsterism of the genre even as it was being celebrated and memorialized. V for Vendetta was no less confused, but it was more blatantly, and therefore honestly, fantastic; playing out on a grand scale the chimerical transformation wish of the magically empowered geek made vengeful terrorist, the bullied, or in this case actually tortured, arty little fellow with a grudge, untold wealth and an all but indestructible new fantasy body as antifascist provocateur. Watchmen admittedly, in its best subplot, has one character at least, the psychopathic Rorschach, who comes close to the actual outcome of this kind of dangerous daydream. But the rest of the crew, and in particular the ultimate villain of the piece, show the actual intellectual and political poverty of this particular fanboy reverie. Without giving away the supposedly secret identity of this evil genius, or, in my favorite unintentional belly-laugh in the original comic book, sensibly changed into something blander but less giggly in the movie, said genius's plan to shock the world into world peace, let me just say that the failure of the fantasy nerds to mature intellectually and politically beyond a touchingly juvenile, if tedious disaffection is made embarrassingly obvious in the story's goofy Götterdämmerung.

In Moore's original hot mess, the notoriously wacky author of course mixed in an unhealthily nihilistic mysticism, to lend a weight of more ambiguous bullshit to his already heavy load, in the Zen passive, if no less bloody minded figure of the nerd as Tidy Bowl blue God, Dr. Manhattan. In the movie the more Alan-Moorish aspects of this character were left largely, blessedly unarticulated, except in the occasional voice-over from Mars. But the whole movie, for me, went from depressingly silly to something very like honest-to-God, eye-popping, blockbuster entertainment every time we were allowed a glimpse of the good doctor's, which is to say, Billy Crudup's, Big Blue Dick. In the comic book, Dr. Manhattan's occasional full frontal was tastefully rendered in the usual three looped "W." On screen though, the actor added dimension and a real weight to his part, or at least to parts below his waist. My only real regret is that the director did not treat us to a single peep at this guy's goods when he expanded into a giant the size of the Chrysler Building. Now for that, I would have paid full price at the Imax.