Graphic Content! Edmonton's Monthly Comic Book Film Series

As we’re showing a great film this month that deals with illegal activity, violence and hidden identities, we decided to showcase some of our favorite crime comics of the past few years to go along with it. We’ve got troubled detectives, cowardly bankrobbers, fast talking con-men, and a mild-mannered diner owner from the Midwest. Check ‘em out!

A History of Violence (originally published 1997)

While the original graphic novel by John Wagner (creator of the perennially successful Judge Dredd) and Vince Locke is actually quite different from the film, the two share a sense of how important violence is to the comics medium, not to mention American culture in general. Tom Mckenna (Stall in the film) is a hardworking diner owner in a Rockewellian Midwest. After a brutal attack, we are taken back in time to his upbringing in the big city, and how a spectacularly risky robbery was to change his life forever. The book spans about 20 years, and features a lot more backstory than its adaptation, so fans of the film should check it out if they want to inhabit the pulpy world of A History of Violence for a longer time.

Criminal Volume One: Coward (originally serialized 2006-2007)

Leo is a pickpocket working the streets of the nameless city in an attempt to just get by. When a crooked cop named Jeff gets the idea for an armored car heist, he strong-arms Leo into the job despite the fact that it violates the code that has kept him alive since the disastrous “Salt Bay job”. Wouldn’t you know it, the heist goes sour, and Leo is forced to go on the run again, this time with Greta, a recovering heroin addict who Leo cannot refuse. The world of the Criminal series by scribe Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Philips is an intricately plotted mesh, where old scores are settled, seedy bars operate as integral parts of the city’s nervous system and the constant threat of violence hangs in the air like a pall. The “coward” of the title shares more than a few similarities with Tom Mckenna/Stall, but you’ll have to check out the comic to find out why.

Goldfish (originally serialized 1994)

David “Goldfish” Gold is a confidence man, who’s returned to his hometown for one last job. The target? His son, who he hasn’t seen for the past ten years. The only thing standing in his way is the boy’s mother, Lauren, who has in his absence taken over organized crime in the city, using as her headquarters the Club Cinderella. And she’s not likely to let anything get away from her.

An early work by mega-popular comics creator Brian Michael Bendis, Goldfish touches on many of the same themes as both the film and print versions of A History of Violence, namely ideas about family, identity and what it means to be “a man”. Bendis has since gone on to helm other noir comics projects like Powers, Alias and Sam and Twitch, but this book that he wrote and drew on his own remains an excellent outing.

Stumptown (originally serialized 2009-2010)

Finally, this month’s book list wraps up with a personal favorite of Graphic Content creators Erin and Matt, Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth’s Stumptown. The first series follows private investigator Dex Parios, who follows in the grand hardboiled tradition of probably being too smart for her own good. When hired to track down the errant granddaughter of a prominent casino boss, the wisecracking sleuth quickly finds out that she’s in over her head. The book is an ode to the bygone era of detective shows like Magnum P.I. and The Rockford Files, and is a must for those who enjoy their mysteries quick-witted and punchily-written. Much like A History of Violence subverts expectations in its gruesome depiction of violence and absence of heroism, Stumptown subverts expectations by giving us a female protagonist in a male dominated genre.

All these books will be on sale at Metro Cinema before and after our screening of A History of Violence on May 15th at 9:15 PM, as well as at Warp One Comics and Games all month afterwards.

For this month’s booklist, we chose to feature books that deal with some of the same issues that Daniel Clowes touched on in Ghost World, like teen angst, living in the modern world, and urban anomie. Enjoy them, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Ghost World: Special Edition (originally serialized 1993-1997)

The inspiration for this month’s screening, Ghost World is a classic tale of cynical young women struggling to stay sane in the face of dullness and decay. Enid Coleslaw and Rebecca Doppelmeyer have become much more than the characters in a comic book, by now they are the crystallization of a moment in time personified. In our current era of corporate control, rampant franchises and the Internet, it’s interesting to revisit how it felt at the moment these forces were only just beginning to seep into our everyday, meaningless existence.

Black Hole (originally serialized 1995-2005)

Imagine you live in an alternate universe, when instead of directing, say, M. Butterfly, Canadian director David Cronenberg instead helmed the good natured high school coming of age movie Dazed and Confused. And he was given free reign by the studio to add as much of his signature “body horror” as he wanted to. This Frankensteinian mash-up is perhaps the best way of quickly explaining the feel of Charles Burns’ Black Hole. It takes place in the Seattle suburbs of the 1970s, where a strange disease known only as “the Bug” is drastically changing the lives of local teenagers by making them grow new body parts. Where Ghost World makes its point about the distances people nowadays have between us somewhat subtly, the way in which it is difficult for real connections to be made is grossly apparent in Black Hole, as its social ostracism leaves very real marks.

Local (originally serialized 2005-2008)

Megan Mckeenan is a restless wanderer, a vagabond. No matter where she goes she can’t seem to settle down and fit in, nor does she want to. She picks up various jobs and friends, but nothing sticks, so she moves on in search of another place to call home. In writer Brian Wood and illustrator Ryan Kelly’s Local, we follow Megan and she travels across North America looking for her place in the world. Made up of 12 individual but connected stories, each set in a different real life city, Local explores how the places we come from and live impact our lives and shape our identities. In Ghost World, Clowes explored the malaise and doldrums of the American suburbs on the teenage psyche; Local examines the effects of place on a much grander scale, examining one young girl’s life journey and how hard it is to escape where you come from.

Ghost of Hoppers (originally published 2006)

Margarita “Maggie” Chascarillo is the manager of a seedy apartment building found somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. She’s not what she used to be, she’ s in her thirties now,  no longer an ace mechanic/punk rocker and occasional wrestling enthusiast. Now the only things she’s wrestling with are demons from her past, mostly the turbulent relationship she had with her now distant best friend/lover “Hopey” Glass. Ghost of Hoppers is a stand-alone entry from Jaime Hernandez’ half of his and his brothers’ comic odyssey Love and Rockets, one of the best series of all time. It shares with Ghost World a similar art style and worldview; at times you could imagine this as an end point to the friendship of Enid and Rebecca as well.

All these books will be on sale at Metro Cinema before and after our screening of Ghost World on April 17th at 9:00, as well as at Warp One Comics and Games all month afterwards.

As part of her guest curating duties, we’ve asked Suzette Chan to put together a booklist of aesthetically and thematically relevant titles to go with her film choice, American Splendor. As we approach our screening on March 20th Suzette has been sharing both the titles she’s chosen and her thoughts on them. Here we present her last installment discussing two Canadian books, My New York Diary by Julie Doucet and Esex County by Jeff Lemire:

Harvey Pekar was inspired by underground comix artists like his friend and mentor, Robert Crumb, to make comics that he wanted to read, no matter the conventional market wisdom.

In turn, Pekar inspired a generation of independent comics artists to write and publish autobiographical comics. Canadian cartoonists took readily to the form, producing the likes of Chester Brown, Seth and Michel Rabagliati. These artists are among those represented in the Gilbert Bouchard comic collection at the University of Alberta. A recent exhibit of this collection inspired the selection of American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar as part of the Graphic Content film series at the Metro Cinema.

In this last installment of my reading list to accompany the movie American Splendor, I look at two works that combine the personal narrative with other themes associated with the comics form.

My New York Diary (originally published 1999)

Like Harvey Pekar, Julie Doucet published began her career in comics by self-publishing. Her comic, Dirty Plottee, featured stories of a personal nature, even confessional nature. Unlike Pekar, Doucet could draw. She developed a distinctive style that exaggerated the grotesque in messed up people, cluttered apartments and littered streets. Her stories of dysfunctional relationships were very open about common but under-told facets of desire and ambition from a female perspective.
My New York Diary (Drawn and Quarterly) gathers together stories that follow Doucet’s cluttered path to a comics career in New York. The comic book “Julie” is amenable to a fault, overly easy to distract with beer or drugs. But her career is nearly derailed by a some bad relationships.

Despite having to tend to suicidal suitors, bad boyfriends and her own medical concerns (she has epilepsy), Julie has made the transition from art school in Montreal to living in New York City. Doucet often shows Julie working furiously on her comics in makeshift studios (often her kitchen table) while the mess at home — consisting of physical junk and personal problems — threatens to crowd her out of the panel. But Julie’s hard work pays off, and her work is published in top-tier indie publications.

In a very meta episode, Julie attends a party for the magazine, Raw. At the party, she meets New York’s indie comic elite, including Art Spiegelman, Francoise Mouly and Charles Burns (with whom Doucet shares an affinity for ink-heavy art).

While the comic up to this point is dominated by panels that show distorted perspectives, the three panels depicting the Raw party are like a straight-on cross-section. They take up the full width of the page: no gutters impede Julie’s movement across the room. Julie appears to be standing on equal footing with the artists and publishers she admires. While she is modest while indulging in mutual praise, her boyfriend scowls beside her. The sequence ends with Julie and her partner, drawn at a different level now, exiting the bottom lefthand corner. After they get home, the relationship continues to deteriorate.

(Ultimately, Doucet did join the ranks of those indie comics giants, only to stop working in the medium and to leave the scene altogether by the turn of the century. Seeking more experimental ground, she has continued to tell her story in different media, most notably in an autobiographical book made entirely of alphabetical letters clipped from vintage magazines.)

Re-reading My New York Diary in conjunction with American Splendor, I was conscious that readers often want to read about aspirational characters who project strength — role models like Superman or Wonder Woman, for example. Doucet’s comics avatar, like Pekar’s, is engaging precisely because there was a distance between the character’s aspirations and his or her reality. My New York Diary concludes as Julie seems to have identified the next step in closing the gap.

Essex County (originally published 2009)

Whereas the influence of underground comics is strong in Doucet’s My New York Diary, Jeff Lemire’s Essex County is where the personal narrative intersects with superhero stories.

Collecting three sets of single issues into one giant volume, the Top Shelf edition of Essex County begins with “Tales from the Farm,” the story of a rural kid named Lester. There are no skyscrapers on the land that Lester surveils he’s dressed up like a superhero, so he fantasizes about flying past the windmill and the grain silo.

Lemire conveys Lester’s loneliness and isolation with generous white spaces. His loose drawing style allows for characters to morph, which is very important in this multigenerational saga in which revelations about the past change our perception of characters whose futures we’ve just read.

Lester is looking for heroes. An orphan, he lives  with his bachelor uncle, a dour older man with whom he shares few interests. Lester loves superheroes and hockey players. He even draws his own comic book, featuring a character that he’s named Powerman. The two parts of the hero’s name reflect on a quality Lester doesn’t feel he possesses and a status he has not yet attained.

Lester’s comic earns him his first friend from outside of the farm: Jimmy, the slow-witted pump jock who is something of a town legend for having been a professional hockey player in the past. The superhero narrative is understandably appealing to both Jimmy and Lester. Within the community, they’re both structurally powerless, but culturally powerful: Jimmy represents the failure of the town’s past hopes, while Lester represents a fresh future. But Lester soon learns that viewing life as a superhero narrative cannot stop tragedy, although it can blunt the pain.

The next two parts of Essex County focus on the backstories of other town residents, two brothers who played for the Toronto Maple Leafs and a county nurse. These other stories call upon other literary genres, the hockey legend and the Canadian prairie gothic. Because of the strength of Lemire’s storytelling, Essex County is not a formulaic catalogue of genres. Instead, it is a powerful, character-driven story that is told using hybrid of genres.

Lemire continues to write and/or draw unconventional stories for independent publication while also writing mainstream superhero stories (Sweet Tooth exists somewhere between the two). Fittingly, he rebooted the postmodern superhero Animal Man, who had previously been the subject of a meta-makeover by Grant Morrison, as I discussed in my previous post.

Lemire’s facility with genres and his ability to tell a solid, personal story prove Harvey Pekar’s point that comics don’t have to have superheroes and funny animals. But if they do, they don’t have to be confined to the expectations of the genre. The possibilities for stories in comics is limitless. It’s been great revisiting work by Lemire, Doucet, Morrison and Pekar that push those boundaries.

Thanks to Erin and Matt for inviting me to curate the Graphic Content screening of American Splendor!

Well we want to thank Suzette for coming on board and curating this collection! Join us Tuesday March 20th, tomorrow night, at the Garneau Theatre for the film, where Matt, Erin, and Suzette will be introducing and you can purchase any of these fine graphic novels!

As part of her guest curating duties, we’ve asked Suzette Chan to put together a booklist of aesthetically and thematically relevant titles to go with her film choice, American Splendor. As we approach our screening on March 20th Suzette will be sharing both the titles she’s chosen and her thoughts on them. Here are her thoughts on Animal Man: Deus Ex Machina, a book that, on the surface, would seem to have little to do with American Splendor…

Animal Man: Deua Ex Machina (originally published in 1990)

Apart from both books having been reprinted and relaunched under DC Comics’ Vertigo banner, the similarities between Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor and Grant Morrison’s Animal Man are not obvious.

American Splendor is one man’s vision of how independent comics can tell true stories of an ordinary working man. The Animal Man of the late 1980s is a nascent mainstream comic book industry star’s reinvention of a superpowered fantasy hero.

The protagonists of both comics, though, are on the sidelines of their respective societies. In real life Harvey Pekar was a file clerk, a job he never left until he retired. The “Harvey Pekar” in the comic is aware that he’s in a comic written by Harvey Pekar: he is clearly an avatar for the writer. Animal Man, aka Buddy Baker, was an ordinary, corporate comic book everyhero. In Morrison’s run, Buddy Baker unwittingly struggles toward the truth of his fictional existence, and eventually meets his creator/tormentor Grant Morrison. While the content is different, both Animal Man and American Splendor depend on the creators’ use — some might say manipulation — of the comics medium.

Pekar’s stories are unvarnished accounts of everyday incidents that are, as in real life, often unresolved or unresolvable. However, unlike a mythological figure like Sisyphus, Pekar in the comics is keenly aware that he is not the focus of divine retribution. As an unconventional artist, a working class stiff and an independent thinker, Pekar lives on the margins of society, with virtually no voice in the mainstream. (One of the more epic stories in American Splendor, deals with Pekar losing  his voice potentially forever, as I noted in my post about American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar)

As the movie version of American Splendor emphasizes, Pekar rejected superhero comics. He found that rather than being empowering, the reliance on magic powers to solve problems made for a particularly disempowering narrative.

Pekar wasn’t the only reader who had long outgrown conventional capes and tights narratives. After the success of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, DC Comics recruited offshore for similarly postmodern-minded writers. Grant Morrison pitched Animal Man, for which he had planned “a fashionably Moore-esque spin that would hopefully make him appeal to DC editorial,” Morrison recalls in his memoir, Supergods.

In writing a comic that went beyond genres, and in taking a superhero to the boundaries of its genre, Pekar and Morrison’s projects touched on common postmodern themes:

Marginality: Comics have always appealed to the underdog. Everyone can relate to Clark Kent, an everyman who got no respect, but it was his alter ego as Superman that was the vehicle for the power fantasies. Likewise, Pekar’s everyman get no respect, but rather than sublimating that feeling, American Splendor calls for the reader to respect  ordinary lives. Buddy Baker in Animal Man realizes he’s not an A-list superhero like Superman, and is thrilled to get into Justice League International (they have a health care program). From the sidelines, the hero narrative is not about saving the world (although that can happen, too). It’s about finding a place in it, and understanding it as it is.

Mirroring: The first American Splendor story is a 48-panel soliloquy in which Pekar obsesses over the upsetting discovery that his name is not unique. Animal Man’s real name, Buddy, is so generic, he can’t tell when people on the street are talking to him directly, or broadcasting to any other male in the vicinity. Neither Pekar not Buddy chose their names, but they spent lifetimes attaching unique identities to them. Every other person with the same name or who responds to the generic nickname becomes a mirror: they represent the Harvey Pekars and Buddys they could have been. Fittingly, the Mirror Master appears as a character in Animal Man, as does the animal-themed Bwana Beast. However, Animal Man vanquishes neither villain. With Bwana Beast, Animal Man realizes they are taking different approaches to battle the same forces that are subjugating the animal kingdom. With Mirror Master, Animal Man finds that they are the costumed pawns of larger interests. Mirror Master is less romantic about the whole thing (he is a mercenary, after all), but Animal Man will come to realize the limits of his altruism.

Embrace of Fictionality: Pekar does not present the contents of American Splendor as a discrete, fictional world. The world on the page is the world he is creating with his words and his collaborators’ artwork, and the “Harvey Pekar” in the comic knows this. He speaks to the reader directly, he is shown with copies of American Splendor, he is often depicted speaking about the comic in which he is speaking. Animal Man has no inking that he exists within a fictional world until he gets a hint of it in Animal Man #19 (page 41 of the Vertigo Comics collection, Animal Man: Deus Ex Machina), when he turns dramatically to the reader and shouts, “I CAN SEE YOU!” At this point, though  the realization is just a peyote-induced hallucination for Buddy. It doesn’t make sense until Animal Man meets the ultimate “villain” of the comic, a writer named Grant Morrison, who is writing a comic called Animal Man. Comic book Morrison sounds like Pekar when he sneers at Animal Man: “There’s no problem that can’t be solved by some idiot in tights.” He goes on to do whatever he likes with Animal Man, including having the character brutally beaten, with no consequences.

Awareness of the Medium: Pekar went against the underground comix convention of writing and drawing his stories for the simple reason that he couldn’t draw. The artists who drew Pekar’s comics had access to the referent, but only one, Gerry Shamray, chose to use photo references. As a result, Pekar looks different from story to story. People’s physical appearances don’t morph from one artistic style to the next in real life, but we metaphorically “see” only so many sides of a person. So the act of constructing Pekar from very different depictions has an equivalent in lived experience and underlines the falseness of the iconic image. In contrast, the fictional Animal Man was depicted consistently over most of Morrison’s run by Chas Truog and Doug Hazlewood. Part of the genius of their artwork is that it is firmly within the superhero iconic tradition, so when Morrison fights Animal Man, readers can look upon the artwork as pure fantasy, but to Buddy, it is happening on the same plane of fiction that he inhabits, so it is a very real and deadly situation.

Likewise, Morrison, Truog and Hazlewood bring Wile E. Coyote from the world of animation into the mythopoetic world that characterizes Vertigo Comics. In “Coyote Gospel” (issue #5, collected in the Vertigo trade paperback, Animal Man Volume 1), Morrison renames him “Crafty” (the acts of naming and mirroring are entwined again), and reinterprets the cartoon coyote as a deeply tragic figure. Crafty is from a universe in which cartoons are real. He finally “challenges the brutality of existence” by appealing to the God of that universe. God agrees to end the suffering of the world if Crafty agrees to take on all the suffering himself. He makes the sacrifice, and is sent to Animal Man’s universe. Drawn more realistically than his cartoon form, the humour of Crafty’s violent, gory deaths is replaced with horror. Imagine what the later scene in which the fictional Grant Morrison eviscerates Animal Man would be like in live action.

“Coyote Gospel” is like the Daffy Duck cartoon, “Duck Amuck” (Chuck Jones, 1953), down to scenes that are incompletely drawn, and the lack of scenery. Daffy constantly demands, scenery, as if he didn’t know or didn’t care whether he is fictional and more concerned with appearing in the proper (i.e., flattering) context.

Watching the movie version of American Splendor, I couldn’t help but think of “Duck Amuck” in the scenes where reality meets film. Filmmakers Shari Springer Bergman and Robert Pulcini use a plain white background in the scenes where the real Harvey Pekar and Toby Radloff converse, while the actors who played them, Paul Giamatti and Judah Friedlander, chat in the background. Counting Donal Logue, the screen actor who plays the theatre actor who once played Pekar, the published record shows three film versions of Harvey Pekar (all in one film!) and the Harvey Pekars drawn by the two dozen or so different artists who worked on American Splendor.

In Animal Man, Buddy Baker thoroughly rejects this kind of instability. Having lost his family and having gone dark side, he finally stands up to his creator (Morrison) and demands that his character be restored to his previous comic book existence. It may not be “the” reality, but it is Buddy’s reality, and he will do anything in his power to defend it. And that is exactly what is expected from heroes.