Alternative Visions
Alternative Visions |
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Page 22 of 29  Pages from the graphic novel Luther Arkwright (Valkyrie, 1987). Art/script: Bryan Talbot. A tale postulating a future Britain in which the 'Puritan vs. Romanist' Civil War still rages. Harvey Pekar was perhaps the king of the autobiographers. In his comic American Splendor (self-published, 1976) he collaborated with different artists on stories recreating incidents from his life - the more mundane the better. These often involved episodes from work (he had a day-job as a clerk and porter in a Cleveland hospital), and relied for their effect on a sense of pacing and an ear for speech patterns - though Pekar often contrived to give them a left-wing political spin. The results ranged from the enlightening, to the hilarious, to the regrettably superfluous. The uneven tone was rendered more erratic by the changing roster of artists, who ranged from the excellent (Robert Crumb) to the appalling. Nevertheless, when Pekar was on song, there was nobody to touch him, and he could fulfil his own estimation of himself as an authentic 'voice of the common man'. Although American Splendor had technically been going since 1976, Pekar only became widely known in the 1980s when his stories were collected into trade paperbacks and graphic novels. Indeed, for a while, he became a minor celebrity, with appearances on the David Letterman TV chat show. (These in turn became source material for subsequent comics.) In the 1990s, his life was blighted by cancer: his struggle back to health, aided by his wife, was related in the graphic novel Our Cancer Year (Four Walls, Eight Windows, 1995), drawn by Frank Stack, a moving and typically unsentimental account. Chester Brown has already been mentioned in the context of comedy comics, but was also a fine autobiographer. In the 1990s editions of Yummy Fur, he experimented with highly structured narratives about his childhood and teen years, focusing especially on the legacy of a religious upbringing. In one story, he recounted with disarming frankness the relationship he developed with Playboy magazine, and the enormous guilt this caused him. In another, he recreated aspects of his angst-ridden school days, picturing himself as a painfully shy youth who cannot deal with girls, not least because his home life was so difficult (his mother was simultaneously suffering from mental illness). These tales were eventually collected as the graphic novels, The Playboy (Drawn and Quarterly, 1992) and I Never Liked You (Drawn and Quarterly, 1994), and worked magnificently in this form.  Cerebus: Jaka's Story  Cerebus: Jaka's Story  More Cerebus (Aardvark-Vanaheim). Art/script: Dave Sim. Four consecutive pages from the graphic novel Church anil State (1987), a work of nearly 600 pages. This page: Alternative horror was much more extreme than the mainstream. |