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Graphic Novel Reviews:
Jewish Renaissance Magazine
The graphic novel is one area of publishing that is thriving. Interest in this field is reflected in three very different graphic novels this spring [2019]. One of the roots of the modern graphic novel, or extended comics in a book format, can be found a century ago in the flourishing of wordless, purely visual narratives, typically socialist in outlook and showing one black-and-white image on the right of each spread. Their pioneer in Europe after the First World War was the Flemish artist Frans Masereel. In My Book of Hours (1919), he conveys, through167 bold woodcuts, an everyman’s struggles in a merciless metropolis. Later published in America, Masereel’s example would inspire Lynd Ward to respond with God’s Man, released a week before the Wall Street Crash in 1929. Ward in turn sparked a modest boom in this silent genre, of which Alay-Oop by Walter Gropper, which has been republished by New York Review Comics for the first time since 1930, is a prime example.
Gropper was born in 1897, the eldest son of Romanian and Ukrainian Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side. His family was employed in the garment industry. In 1911 he lost an aunt in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire – a New York sweatshop fire. Perhaps these early experiences of poverty fuelled his determination to transcend his circumstances and transform himself into a political cartoonist, illustrator and painter, absorbing the ideas of avant-garde Modernism and left-wing radicalism.
Gropper brings these ideas to Alay-Oop – the title is a showbiz exclamation to announce an impressive feat – and his first and only extended story is certainly that. As the pictures have to do all the storytelling here, he pays close attention to body language, expressions and gestures, drawing in a few deft dry-brush strokes. His contrast of the outwardly glamorous world of the theatre with the humble everyday lives lived by performers is reminiscent of the period’s societal observations by H.M. Bateman in Britain and George Grosz in Germany, as well as American Jewish ‘tenement’ writers of the time, such as Anzia Yezierska (Hungry Hearts; Bread Givers).
Gropper’s cast consists of three unnamed performers, centred around a young female acrobat; her burly, moustached accomplice (but not a love interest) in their act; and an elegant, self-possessed, older male singer. The author deepens our empathy for his heroine by symbolising her desires and fears through a dream, in which her body careens and even separates in constant motion, flying on horseback or soaring with birds, only to be struck down by lightning and wind up fending off menacing flames. This vulnerability helps us understand why the singer’s promises – and his secure finances – persuade her to marry him.
Years later, those promises prove empty and, as the singer checks his plummeting stocks, his bank account is emptying too. Until this point, the trio have stuck together, but the once high-flying heroine is grounded, coping as their housekeeper and now a mother of twins. Gropper adroitly stokes the tensions between them, building up to a crescendo in which the singer, sketched in jagged, vibrating lines, rages at his wife, and she finally walks out on him, taking their children. The three leads’ individual fates are finally disclosed in clever, single-image codas. Ahead of its time, Alay-Oop speaks to us through nearly ninety years as a compelling tale of one woman’s empowerment and enterprise.
Another model for the graphic novel relates to Surrealism. Anything is possible in comics, so it is no surprise that part of the imaginative vocabulary associated with Surrealism was anticipated and popularised years earlier in some of America’s mass-circulation newspaper strips. For example, several bizarre scenes in Winsor McCay’s Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend (1904-1925) were echoed by co-writers Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí in their landmark 1929 film Un Chien Andalou. Zany situations and absurdist humour also made the stage shows and films of The Marx Brothers wildly popular at this time. One admirer was Dalí, who, after meeting Harpo Marx at a party in Paris in 1936, sent him a gift of a ‘surrealist harp’ with barbed wire for strings. A kinship between them blossomed and inspired Dalí to seek refuge in Hollywood from the war in his native Spain.
In Hollywood, he prepared his first movie script, proposing “something hallucinatory”, which “could make a successful revolution in the Cinema.” He cast Harpo as an exiled Spanish aristocrat who falls in love with a character called The Surrealist Woman, “who personifies the world of fantasy, dreams and imagination”. Dalí developed the scenario and settings and filled a book with notes, designs and doodles. Sadly, his treatment, Giraffes on Horseback Salad was rejected by MGM in 1937 – and by Groucho himself, who declared: “It won’t play”. The screenplay was abandoned by Dalí and thought lost for eighty years.
Then, in 2017, two American writers, Josh Frank and Tim Heidecker, tracked down Dalí’s treatment and notebook for the film. They expanded these into a full script for a graphic novel version as Giraffes on Horseback Salad: Salvador Dali, the Marx Brothers, and the Strangest Movie Never Made from Quirk Books. They also added their own wisecracking patter and song lyrics in classic Marx Brothers’ style.
Unlike cinema, in comics the only limitation on the special effects budget is the imagination of the artist. Spanish illustrator Manuela Pertega does not hold back here in her line-and-wash artwork. Taking her inspiration from Dalí‘s vision for the film, Pertega switches between black-and-white and colour, between grey rectangular panels and eye-popping polychromatic oddness, as panels melt and layouts morph and escalate into full-page and double-page extravaganzas. In the fantasy of film and comics, if not in real life, Dalí’s story affirms than not only will romance triumph, but so will surrealism, because, as he insisted, “absurdity cannot be judged”.
Sarah Lightman’s journey towards her debut graphic memoir was motivated by an attempt to explore the hold her mother exerted over her life, and years later, the result, The Book of Sarah from Myriad Editions and Penn State University Press, is her version of a book missing from the Torah. Initially she worries: “How could I draw a book of my life, when I didn’t know who I was?” But finally she is able to create that book because she comes to know and accept who she is.
Autobiography emerged as a substantial genre in comics only in the early Seventies, although there were scattered trailblazers before. At a turning point in The Book of Sarah, Sarah Lightman takes courage from one such pioneer, Charlotte Salomon. This young German Jewish artist recounted her personal history in pictures and words in Leben? oder Theater? (Life? or Theatre?), an outpouring of 781 gouache paintings from 1940 to 1942, before she was sent to her death in Auschwitz. Lightman recalls, “I hid out in my studio in my parents’ garden…with Charlotte Salomon as company, I began to find my voice.”
While Salomon blended her images with texts, initially on overlays, latterly hand-lettering directly onto her paintings, Lightman prefers another form of comics, which keeps her eloquent commentaries beneath and distinct from her mostly whole- or two-page drawings, the majority rendered in graphite greys, with a few canvases in colour. Much of the time, she remains unseen in these, underplaying the self-representation typical in the autobiographical genre, in favour of meaningful yet mundane objects and locations, often emptied of people. This approach helps the reader sense Lightman’s invisibility and isolation. As she writes, “Things and spaces speak for me.” But finally, she is a “silent me” no more. Lightman’s lyrical and candid confessionals question and resolve how family, religion, art and life have shaped her, from the Slade to Hampstead, from modern Jewish orthodoxy to feminist Judaism, from daughter to mother, from longing to belonging.
Posted: January 3, 2021These Reviews originally appeared in edited form in the July 2019 edition of Jewish Renaissance Magazine.
