My Friend Dahmer

I have a curious connection to this book and its author, besides the fact that we're both from the greater Cleveland area -- and that connection, oddly, extends to Jeffrey Dahmer himself. All three of us were born within the same year, growing up in Northeast Ohio in the 1960's and 70's, and all three of us had fathers who were research chemists. Our houses were all pretty much the same, and were no more than 25 miles apart. And yet one of us became a college professor, one a comics artist and graphic novelist, and one the most notorious serial killer of the twentieth century. I've met Derf a few times, most recently when he gave a talk at RISD, and I've been a fan of his work since coming across his strip, "The City," which used to run in the Providence Phoenix.  The original "My Friend Dahmer" -- a 24-page "floppy" that Backderf put out in 2002 on his own dime, was a masterpiece (and is now a collector's item), but its author was not satisfied. He threw his energies into a muli-year revision and expansion, drawing upon every available source, including interviews, press reports, and material from Dahmer's time in prison. The result is this expanded and definitive My Friend Dahmer.

High school in suburban Ohio in the 1970's was its own strange territory. Looking back on it, the wonder seems that those of us who got through it got through it at all. A telling point is depicted by Derf, when thanks to a phone call from a friend, he hears of Dahmer's arrest and sudden rise to infamy. The friend asks him to "guess who" it was, and Derf's first guess isn't Dahmer! It was a time of counter-cultural resistance, but yet still a time of compliant surface normalcy. Everyone in the classroom appeared more or less normal, but who knew what the kids did when school was out? Smoking joints behind the bus garage, collecting roadkill in jars, coming to class drunk, making Eagle scout, trading some "lids" (an ounce of marijuana) for "soapers" (Quaaludes, a popular recreational sedative) in the school parking lot, and singing in the church choir -- any one of one's classmates might do any or all of the above. In that deeply camouflaged world, a young man named Jeffrey Dahmer could blend in, hide out, become almost invisible as it were.

A sample of "The City"

Derf has a very distinctive graphical style. You'll notice his disinctive shading, which often makes use of tiny black batarangs; a slight chunkiness of facial features which emblazons each head with its distinctive mugshot, and the occasional use -- particularly when Dahmer's face is in the headlights -- of extreme shadows and angles reminiscent of an Orson Welles movie. Within that same stylistic compass, buildings and rooms are realistic in form; as part of his dedication to visual accuracy, Derf employed reference photos to compose interior and exterior "shots," much as would a film director. And again, in a very cinematic manner, Derf's square boxes of commentary have the ring of a voice-over by a hardboiled detective, as in this description of Dahmer's dad: "Lionel was a chemist, hardworking and driven . He was a nice man, but had a forceful personalty and an intimidating intellect." Think Dragnet meets Bladerunner.

But in an important way, My Friend Dahmer is almost a documentary -- albeit one with Derf's particular point of view, as he was a witness to some (though far from all) of the transit of Dahmer's teenage years. There are autobiographical elements, including some of the sketches that he did of Dahmer at the time. But the effect, in total, is much like a dramatic film, albeit one that's far more faithful to the premise "based on a true story" than anything Hollywood churns out. The message, as we begin our tale, seems to be that having Jeffrey Dahmer as our classmate is something that could have happened to any of us -- and that, in the tea-leaves of that time, his future was not yet possible to read.

NB: For those who might be interested, there's a film based on the graphic novel, starring Disney Channel veteran Ross Lynch as Dahmer. It's available free via Amazon Prime, or at a modest cost via a wide variety of streaming services. 

Fun Home

With Fun Home, we're crossing two imaginary lines: first, from graphic adaptations of things that already existed as "text only" -- and second, from allegories, novels, and other fictions into the nonfictional space of  the memoir. In a way, it's a move toward a kind of directness -- there's no intervening "original" to worry about -- but also to a kind of indirection, as memoir is a genre that allows for its own peculiar degree of fictionalization. Literature has seen many "semi-autobiographical" first novels; it's not unusual for the first story a writer tells to be closely based on her own; with memoirs, albeit they are quite openly based on the writer's own experience, the narrative is inevitably shaded by selection of memory -- which story to tell, and how -- so much so that many memoirs may be said to fall into the emerging category of "creative nonfiction."

Fun Home is all that and a bag of chips. There are layers within layers, all deftly handled with the sharpened pens and words of Alison Bechdel. Bechdel, who rose to fame on the basis of her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, was already a veteran of the form when she sat down to frame her life within the squares of graphical narrative. You'll see her eye for detail -- particularly in the house itself, with all its fixtures -- and her subtle use of blue shading, which gives the story a familiar feel, as though we were invited to look in on her life. That same feeling shaped the Broadway musical adaptation, with an adult Bechdel walking through scenes from her own life, enabling both the recreation of the past and her ironic commentary on that recreation (it played in Providence a few years ago, but if you haven't seen it, you can get the feeling for it by watching a clip, or listening to the soundtrack).

An author, we must admit, it the best authority when it comes to her own life -- and yet much of Fun Home revolves around Bechdel's father, himself a riddle wrapped within an enigma wrapped within a deeply closeted man running a funeral home. The genius of the book is that, without ever fully unwrapping all those layers, or resolving all the enigmas of his life and death, we come to see him both through the eyes of a curious daughter and the gaze of that daughter's adult self, more critical and distanced, but still a sort of sweet regard. A great deal of time passes in this book, and we pass with it, growing up as it were alongside Bechdel.

There's lots to talk about here -- her singular visual style, her treatment of time and space, even the lettering (for which Bechdel commissioned her own font). So let's get started!

Second Half of The Handmaid's Tale

I thought it best to have a separate posting for the second half of the graphic adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale -- there are different issues raised there -- and also, it's less confusing to have the conversational thread start fresh.

We realize, in the end, that the narrative we've been following turns out to be an historical document -- the subject, indeed, of a presentation at an even more far-future academic conference of some kind. Renee Nault mentions in an interview that she'd been tempted to replace the male lecturer with a woman, but that in this one instance, Atwood nixed the idea. There was a desire, somehow, to make it all more hopeful, but apparently the author wanted to leave things stand. Nault does add, though, a small vignette of a handmaid -- perhaps the future equivalent of a PowerPoint slide -- at the bottom of the frame.

Personally, I'm very fond of the end of the 1990 film, where the former Offred -- brilliantly portrayed by the late Natasha Richardson -- is seen in her trailer, her place of escape, complete with a faithful dog. It is here, we learn, that she recorded -- using what now seems an ancient device known as a cassette recorder -- the narrative that has spilled upon these pages of print, and over them into the imagery of colors of Nault's adaptation.

The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale first appeared in 1985, at a time when its dystopian religious-state future seemed to some to be -- potentially, at least -- just around the corner. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority organization had emerged as a major political player, along with other evangelical leaders; many decried the rising tide of "secularism" and demanded that their God combine forces with the state. At the same moment, the expansion of mass media -- tame by today's standards, but notable at the time -- gave many the feeling that, with the vast increase in cable channels and the abolishment of the "Fairness Doctrine," the possibility of state control of the media was a real and present danger.

How naive some of these fears seem today -- not because they were groundless, but because when these things really came to pass, they were a good deal more insidious -- and darker -- than anyone back then could have imagined. It's little wonder that the novel has come back into prominence today; Atwood herself has written about the power it's had in its new (juxta)position. The current television series starring Kate Moss is certainly one sign of this renewed relevance; this graphical adaptation by Renee Nault is surely another. Nault, like Atwood, is Canadian, which certainly gives her an ideally parallel perspective on Canada's irksome southern neighbor, but she's also a generation younger, a native of the dynamic, cosmopolitan province of British Columbia. Her style is very much influenced by other arts of the "Pacific rim," drawing in particular from that of Japanese Ukiyo-e prints. And, as we've seen with other graphic novels such as Kristina Gehrmann's version of The Jungle, the presence of red in a dark world is even more dramatic -- not only is it, of course, the color of the habits assigned to handmaids, but it's the color of blood. And here, unlike in Gerhmann's work, it's a bright, bright red, spilling onto and over the frames and margins of the page. Nault has talked about her approach, but bear in mind that, as with our other books, it's we the viewers and readers of this book in whose eyes and hands the ultimate judgement of her success rests. 

Animal Farm

George Orwell's Animal Farm -- originally published in 1945, is an allegory, a fable, a cautionary tale about the emergence of a totalitarian state -- in a famyard. It's said that Orwell's strong take on his subject was formed by his experiences fighting the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War in 1936-37. The dictator Francisco Franco had declared war upon his own country, and like the "fasces" for which fascism is named, his bundle of sticks (that is, his armed forces) held together, and prevailed. The opposition, fractured by political infighting and attempts by outside forces to co-opt their forces, never really had much of a chance.

Orwell had originally sought to join the International Brigades, which were controlled by the Soviet-directed Communist Party, but found himself rejected by them because he was too much of a free-thinking, too unwilling to toe the party line. He then joined the Worker's Party of Marxist Unification. As fate would have it, this put him on the losing side of an internal split within the international Communist party, which pitted those aligned with Leon Trotsky against the central party under the control of Josef Stalin -- a fight which ended with Trotsky's assassination in Mexico in 1940. Disillusioned by the whole mess, Orwell initially wrote a nonfiction memoir, Homage to Catalonia (1938), but it received little attention at the time. At that point, it seemed to him that perhaps the best way to show the flaws of party-dominated "groupthink" was more by way of a parable than an appeal to reason.

It took a while to sink in. In the wake of the end of World War II, the gradual growth of anti-communist fervor in the United States made the book a target -- at times, for both sides. The first illustrated edition was released alongside the 1954 animated firm version, with illustrations by Joy Batchelor and John Halas, who had done the character art for the film (it's worth nothing that this was the first feature-length animated cartoon ever produced in Britain, as well as that it received much of its funding from the CIA!). Other noteworthy versions were illustrated by Ralph Steadman (known for his collaborations with Hunter S. Thompson) and Quentin Blake (known for his work on Roald Dahl's books). This new edition has been illustrated by Odyr Bernardi, a Brazillian cartoonist and artist born in 1967. His work hasn't been widely known in the US before, but his graphic novel Guadalupe, written in collaboration with the poet Angélica Freitas, was widely acclaimed.

So what is Animal Farm ultimately, about? Who are the pigs, and who are the heroic horses? Orwell himself identified as a socialist, but saw all too vividly the hazards of a "socialist" party that proclaimed "some animals are more equal than others." Your thoughts here.

The Jungle

For those who believe that literature can have a powerful, positive, effect on society, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) is both a heartening and a disheartening example. Sinclair's portrait of the horrific living conditions of recent immigrants to the United States, and his specific portrait of the horrors of employment in the meat-packing industry, had a powerful effect beyond the one it had on its immediate readers. It led, dramatically and directly, to the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906, which greatly improved conditions at these plants -- for the meat, at any rate. The situation of the workers, and of immigrant families generally, did not improve, leading Sinclair to comment, with some bitterness, that he had "aimed at the public's heart, and by accident hit it in the stomach." Sinclair's embrace of the worker's cause, and of the promise of organizing trade unions, was prescient -- but in his day, he was more often hated than praised for it, and it's quite possible that, were a similar such story to appear today, it might re-ignite some of these same debates, which perhaps have never really gone away -- for some, "socialist" is still as dirty a word as it was in 1906.

The Jungle has been adapted in many forms, the first being a silent film made in 1914. Sinclair admired the film so much that he appeared in person in it as a sort of prologue and epilogue; once its first commercial run was completed, he bought the rights to the original negative with the hope of having it screened to wider audience. Unfortunately, as with many films of this era, no print of this version survives, though one can get something of a sense of it from the movie posters and publicity materials. A new film version was planned in 2011 by David Schwimmer (There Will Be Blood), but it was never made. And, a few years earlier, our old friend Peter Kuper did a version for the re-booted "Classics Illustrated" series; Kuper's adaptation drew from the visual vocabulary of modernist art, making it in some ways feel closer to the period, though some readers found his version a bit too grotesque for their tastes.

Kristina Gehrmann is a graphic novelist and artist from Germany with quite a few major works to her credit, although her version of The Jungle is the first to appear in print in English. In 2015, her most substantial work -- Im Eisland ("In the Land of Ice") was published in Germany; it has since appeared in English as a webcomic, which you can read here. Filling three volumes, it undertakes to retell the story of the ill-fated Franklin expedition to the Arctic, a voyage that began with optimism and cheers and ended with cannibalism and despair. As she did with Im Eisland, Gehrmann combines meticulously researched and detailed backgrounds, clothing, and historical perspective with a facial style that is somewhat more like that of Japanese manga than of strict realism. Within that style, though, Gehrmann conveys emotion with masterful simplicity, leading a reviewer for the New York Journal of Books to remark that “In many ways, Gehrmann achieves what Upton Sinclair never quite did: She makes the characters real and complex, and she makes the political story a movingly human one.” As with Kuper's Heart of Darkness, Gehrmann's Jungle is mainly monochrome -- except for the visitations of red -- as meat, as blood, as human blushes and fury -- which haunts these pages to wonderful effect.

So read the first half of The Jungle -- and post your thoughts about it here. And, if you like, you can phrase your comment as a question for the author; with her permission, I'll be passing along some of these questions to her, and we can have the rare experience of getting answers directly from the artist/adapter herself!

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, was originally published as "The Heart of Darkness" beginning in February of 1899 in Blackwood's Magazine. It appeared in book form in 1902, minus the "The" in the title. Numerous critics have hailed it as the essential book of the twentieth century; T.S. Eliot quoted one of its key lines in "The Hollow Men," and it was famously adapted for film by Frances Ford Coppola in 1979 as Apocalypse Now. It has become a grim epitome for a grim era, but is also one of the most economically and beautifully crafted novellas in English.

Which is no mean feat, considering that its author, Joseph Conrad, was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Poland, and that English was his third language (after Polish and French). Writing was also his second career, after a lengthy one as a seaman, rising from ordinary seaman to mate to Master from 1878 to 1886. In the process, he taught himself English, changed his name, and embarked on a long-sought career as a writer.

Peter Kuper grew up in Cleveland, Ohio -- which is also my own home town -- and that of graphic-memoir giant Harvey Pekar. Through Pekar, Kuper met the even more infamous Robert Crumb,  who helped him put out some of his earliest comics in exchange for some rare jazz records. Like Stanley Zuckerberg, Kuper attended the Pratt Institute, then went off on a series of travels around the world, all of which he graphically documented, before returning to New York, where he's continued to work as a comic artist and illustrator. In addition to Heart of Darkness, he's adapted a number of Franz Kafka stories, as well as illustrating a Spanish translation of Alice in Wonderland, Alicia en el País de las Maravillas.

His choice to tackle Heart of Darkness resonates here in 2020 -- why now? Why, some may ask, given the broad critique of the novel's racism by leading African writers such as Chinua Achebe, should such a book be chosen for adaptation today? Kuper himself addresses this in his "Art of Darkness" introductory essay. His approach, by his own account, was twofold: first to ensure that his representations of natives of West Africa were accurate, he conducted photo research in the archives; he also studied and worked to avoid stereotypical features or dress. Secondly, also whenever he could, he "flipped the perspective," focusing not on how Marlow and the white employees of the company saw the natives, but on how the natives saw the white people.

I'm not sure that either of these strategies completely succeeds. One strange effect is that the African figures in these pages appear, as it were, more realistic, while the images of white characters are made more cartoonish. At the same time, I think there are moments when he does succeed in opening up other dimensions of Conrad's narrative, and giving us pause over scenes that the original novel glossed over. So read the book -- be sure to read both introductory essays -- and see what you think, both about whether Kuper has succeeded in his effort to 'flip the script,' and also about the story and images as a whole. Post your thoughts here, referencing specific scenes when possible (you'll note that the book doesn't have page numbers).