Brainiac Summer Reading -- Part 3 of 5

It's very difficult to put off reading a new comic book. My impulse today is the same as it was in 1977, riding home from the Norton Flea Market in my mother's VW Rabbit with a pile of Silver Age DC titles. I wanted to read 'em right away! However, over the course of the past few months, I've managed not to read a few excellent-looking graphic novels and comics collections. I'll get started next week...

Click here for Part 1 of this series: NEW FICTION.

Click here for Part 2 of this series: REISSUED CLASSICS
Click here for Part 3 of this series: COMICS

"Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips (1956-1966)" (Fantagraphics), by Jules Feiffer. Like Jerry Lewis, Mel Brooks, Bob Newhart, Robert Altman, Philip K. Dick, John Barth, John Updike, and Philip Roth, Jules Feiffer is a quintessential example of the Postmodernist Generation. I don't mean that Feiffer is a postmodernist theorist; I mean he's plagued with the conviction (as I've said of some of his contemporaries) that something's gone awry with the technologically advanced, prosperous, contented, triumphalist liberal democracy that is postwar America; he lacks -- and therefore both mocks and mourns -- the virile can-do spirit of some of his generation's immediate predecessors; and his characters are beset with anxiety-provoking tensions, uncertainties, paradoxes that can never be resolved. (Think of the supine fellow who says to himself, in a strip dated 5/14/58: "It's not healthy to lie here! Got to arouse myself! Got get involved! Now! Right now!" Then: "Or am I rationalizing? Perhaps I don't really want to get up. Perhaps I feel that I have at last found my role." Then: "Or perhaps though lying here attracts me, getting up also attracts me -- hence my indecision." And so forth.) Still don't believe in my American Generational Periodization Scheme? In Gary Groth's fine introduction, we learn that Feiffer says of himself: "I was part of a generation. I identified with that generation and I was curious about what made us all tick." Groth rightly notes that the 10 years of Feiffer's strips in "Explainers" are "practically an encyclopedia of issues preoccupying the public intellectual from 1956 to 1966." Plus, they're funny! Can't wait to crack this one.

"Freddie & Me: A Coming-of-Age (Bohemian) Rhapsody" (Bloomsbury), by Mike Dawson. James Parker writes, of the English rock act Queen,: "The flourishes of minstrelly doo-wop, the wry formal mastery, the preposterous superfluity of invention... That was always the thing about Queen -- they were a luxury." I quite agree. But for Mike Dawson, who was born in Scotland but grew up in New Jersey, Queen was a necessity: the soundtrack to his coming-of-age. The band's preposterous superfluity of invention allowed the adolescent Dawson to locate in their lyrics and music themes and emotions that enabled him to make sense of his life's most important and confusing moments.

Mome (Summer 2008). I once called Fantagraphics' publications the most important literary form of the late 20th century; their graphic-lit quarterly proves my point. Edited by Eric Reynolds and Gary Groth, Mome has been an ongoing revelation since day one. The current issue, featuring the work of lesser-known (in America, anyway), recently established, and up-and-coming European and North American artists like Paul Hornschemeier (whose 2007 graphic novel "The Three Paradoxes" was top-notch), Poland-born Tom Kaczynski, newcomer Conor O'Keefe, Portland's Andrice Arp, France's Emile Bravo, Brooklyn's Dash Shaw, Nova Scotia's Ray Fenwick, and the brilliant experimentalist French cartoonist Killoffer. PS: The worldess murder mystery "5:45," Al Columbia, who lives in western Massachusetts, is the only thing I've read so far; it's great.

"Classics Illustrated #1: Great Expectations," by Charles Dickens, adapted by Richard Geary; and "Classics Illustrated Deluxe #1: The Wind in the Willows," by Kenneth Grahame, adapted by Michel Plessix (Papercutz). Classics Illustrated, the comic book series that from 1941 until 1962 brought the great works of Western literature to members of the Anti-Anti-Utopian and Boomer generations, is back! Last year, it was announced that Papercutz had acquired the Classics Illustrated license and would begin publishing reprints of some of the original titles with new modern adaptations, largely produced in France. So far, so good! These stories look both more complete and more skillfully rendered than the original CIs. It's Heavy Metal magazine for kiddies -- awesome.

"Wings. Strings. Meridians." (Yeti), by Tara Jane ONeil. Everything that Yeti publishes is exquisite, and beautifully produced. This little 96-page collection of drawings and paintings -- made by a Portland-based artist and musician, known as TJO, who is fascinated by internal mechanisms, dogs, horses, shamans, rapture, and superstring theory -- comes with a soundtrack (a 15-song CD). Or vice versa. Nice!

"Willie & Joe: The WWII Years" (Fantagraphics), by Bill Mauldin. Most people my age probably haven't heard of Mauldin, except perhaps as an unseen character in Charles M. Schulz's annual (beginning in 1969) Veterans Day "Peanuts" strip, with whom Snoopy, dressed as an army vet, quaffs a few root beers and tells war stories. I discovered Mauldin as a child, because my grandfather had a copy of his autobiographical 1949 book "A Sort of a Saga," a fun and absorbing account of growing up during the Depression in the American Southwest; I stumbled upon Willie and Joe later. A "dogface" soldier in the 45th Infantry Division before the US entered WWII, Mauldin volunteered to draw cartoons about his comrades for the division's newspaper; he continued to do so as he fought in the July 1943 invasion of Sicily and the Italian campaign. His characters, Willie and Joe, grew more and more tired, filthy, and darkly subversive; yet in 1944, Stars and Stripes, the American soldiers' newspaper, sent Mauldin to the front in his own jeep, with instructions to produce six cartoons a week. Hard to imagine, today. Here, for the first time, Fantagraphics brings together Mauldin's complete works -- over 600 cartoons, most never before reprinted -- from 1940 through the end of the war.