100 Great Pages: Lewis Trondheim & Sergio Garcia's Les Trois Chemins, pages 3-4

Twelfth of a series of posts about 100 great comics pages.
Links to: an introduction to the series; an index of posts by creator; an index of posts by title.

It'd be an exaggeration to say that I've read Les Trois Chemins. I've certainly looked closely at every page (which is a significant part of what it means to "read" comics (and why it is perfectly sensible to talk about reading even wordless comics), but hardly the entirety of it). But I've done a sort of half-hearted job on the words. The reason here is simple: Les Trois Chemins is in French. And it's not been translated -- at least not yet. My French is good enough to sort of hack away at the text with a dictionary in hand, but this bears the same resemblance to reading that hacking through a jungle with a machete does to bicycle riding. In both cases you travel some distance, but that's all that you can say about the matter.*

But for me, even given my difficulty of the language, Les Trois Chemins (the title means "The Three Ways" or "The Three Paths") is an utterly delightful book.

Les Trois Chemins is a children's book** -- a fairly brief one too, only 32 pages long. The book is structured around the three paths of its title -- paths which criss-cross, join, separate, entwine and otherwise get very tangled over the course of the work. On those paths travel four main characters. The first path starts with two: John Mc Mac -- a rich man, in search of someone who owes him some gold -- accompanied by his secretary, cook, housekeeper and porter, Robert. The second path is traveled by Roselita, a young girl: she is fed by a cloud which rains bread, but it's begun to rain stones, so she needs to find the master of the clouds to fix the situation. The third path starts as a river, with a robot named Duezio in a boat, drifting down but afraid to get out because it's afraid of rusting. Each of the characters meets various people, animals, and so forth, and gets various adventures: the plot of the book is essentially the journey across the pages. What makes the book fun are the various ways the paths interact, cross, mirror each other, and so forth. (You'll see what I mean in a minute, once I show you a page.) The characters' journeys take them underground, into a world on the clouds, into buildings, over an ocean, and so on and so forth. It's a wonderfully charming, fanciful book.

But, y'know, in French. Which I decipher more than read.

How did I happen upon such a book, in a language that I read slowly and with difficulty? Well, Lewis Trondheim is associated with the Oubapo, the comics spin-off of the Oulipo, and I'd gotten interested in Oubapian techniques, including the work of the American spin-off, such as the amazing work of Matt Madden. All clear? No? Well, see here for more (then here); but this is the short version: The Oulipo is a French literary group devoted to constraints in literature (ranging from poetic forms such as the sonnet or sestina to more outré forms such as the lipogram to newly invented ones such as the N+7 method); the Oubapo uses parallel techniques (some almost precisely the same, some unique to comics and without parallel in poetry or prose) in sequential art. Anyway, Les Trois Chemins was plugged as one of the few book-length Oubapian works, so I tracked down a copy.

... But it's all a bit moot, actually, since I don't even think it's that Oubapian a work. It's experimental, insofar as it plays with the comics page in wild and wonderful ways; but those ways aren't, to my mind, particularly characteristic of the Ou-X-po groups. -- The Oubapo disagrees, incidentally, and give it their official seal in the back ("Ouvrage agréé par l'Ouvroir de Bande Dessinée Potentielle"). You might want to listen to them rather than me on the issue of what is and isn't characteristic of their own work -- I would, if I were you (although, since I'm me and not you, I still think I'm right.)

I should mention that Lewis Trondheim, credited as the writer ("scénario"), is one of the preeminent French cartoonists working today. (It says so right here on the label.) He's done a huge variety of work, sometimes both drawing and writing, sometimes just writing. Except for the silent Mister O -- which is also wonderful, a marvelous exercise in existential humor, or funny despair, or something (for more see Derik's review) -- I don't know any of his numerous other work. But various translations of his books have been published by First Second, Fantagraphics and NBM, so if you're interested they're around.

As for artist Sergio Garcia, I know even less about him (except that he shares a name with some !@#$% golfer which makes him hard to google). Other than the "Trois Chemins" series, he collaborated with Trondheim on another book called Bande dessinée, apprendre et comprendre; and he's done a neat-looking kids book called L'aventure d'une BD ("Adventures of a Comic Book") which looks like a sort of 'how-books-are-made' guide.

Returning to Les Trois Chemins, let's look at pages three and four (note that I'm again exercising my self-imposed rule that a "page" is something that works as a single visual unit, so that a double-page spread counts if I want it to). The first double page introduces the characters; here the paths start to mix and things start to get interesting:

(Click for larger version.)

In addition to Lewis Trondheim, the writer, and Sergio Garcia, the artist, this page has colors by Lola Moral. (And sorry for the middle of the scan -- the art sort of gets swallowed by the middle of the page.)

Where shall I start on the wonderfulness that is this page?

I guess with the obvious: after a (double) page of simple parallel traveling, we have here the first interactions between the three paths.*** The river that Deuzio (the robot) travels on snakes up the page, going under bridges in both the other paths, so that whereas the first page had John Mc Mac & Robert's path on top, Roselita's in the middle and Deuzio's along the bottom, by the end of this page the order is Deuzio - John Mc Mac/Robert - Roselita. The twisting and braiding makes for a fun design, of course, and it continues, in increasingly wild permutations, throughout the book. On this page Duezio is clearly the linking thread, interacting twice with Roselita and once with John Mc Mac & Robert, although which of the characters is the linking thread shifts (and sometimes its minor characters rather than one of the three (and there isn't one on every page)).

We also get the first interactions between the characters: as Duezio's boat passes under the first bridge, both Duezio and Roselita cry out to the other for help. Roselita has identified Duezio as a knight ("chevalier") and cries out to it in appropriately flowery language; Duezio simply cries "help! help!". Neither manages to help the other -- but Duezio does get stuck with Roselita's stone-raining cloud, which mysteriously begins to again rain bread (as Roselita wishes it to) once it switches. Roselita runs around to try to help Duezio, but to no avail; she continues on, however, to try again (and get her bread-raining cloud back) -- with the cheerful thought (in the text accompanying the last image of her on the page) that perhaps the knight (i.e. Deuzio) will marry her. Meanwhile, Deuzio hopes that Robert will help it... but John Mc Mac, Robert's employer, is scandalized by the idea of doing it for free ("Gratuitement?"), and hurries them along -- taking with him the cloud, now raining rain. (John Mc Mac thinks they should try to catch the rain, since it's free water.)

The structure of this page (and, indeed, the entire comic) forces some interesting and comparatively unusual choices on the reader. The braiding paths function almost as a comics version of a hypertext: as in some postmodern fictions, each reader is forced to decide for themselves which order to read the page in. In customary comics order, one reads each panel (no help there -- no panels) in the same order that you'd read a text in, left-to-right, up-to-down, reading the elements within each panel the same way. But here it's not clear. If you start in the upper-left-hand corner, reading the journey of John Mc Mac and Robert, you'll go straight to the second bridge -- an event that clearly occurs after the first bridge crossing in the lower part of page three. (On this particular double spread, you might solve this problem by reading all of page three and then all of page four -- but it won't work on every page, nor on every problem on this page.) Each path is continuous: when you reach the edge of the page, that particular thread of plot just continues. Do you follow it? But the threads merge, split, mix in various ways -- so obviously that won't do.

But assuming you start with John Mc Mac & Robert, at what point do you break off to start reading of Roselita? Or Deuzio? Do you read all of one thread on this double page, and then double back before turning to pages five and six? That treats the page breaks as far more significant than they really are. And if you do this, you'll have a very different experience of the moment at the first bridge (as each of the figures cries for help) then if you creep up to it along both paths at once.

It's not as fully Abelian as some hypertexts -- indeed, the entire comic is about a journey, is very much a series of progressions that demand to be read, in order, across the 32-page journey. Still, any two readers are unlikely to read the elements of this page -- let alone any of the other pages, or the book as a whole -- in the same order.

The paths march relentlessly on: each encounter is filled with more history than any single path encompasses; if you double-back it will distort your view as much as if you don't. Whichever order you read it in, you will be forced to play catch-up: you can't deal with it all in order, since it's happening all at once. -- In all of this, this comic works unlike normal narratives -- and very much like life, where in all our interactions we are always seeing half a story, always unaware of the other threads we cross and join and diverge from, always trying to catch up on the past.

As I said, it's fascinating the way the characters' journeys intersect and interact. But what makes the page so much fun are the details. There's Robert's Little Prince -like love for flowers, birds and mushrooms, which John Mc Mac (like Saint Exupery's Businessman) says he will simply buy. There's the way that Deuzio feels threatened by the branch that Roselita offers him ("elle veutm'achever avec son bâton"); there's the fact that Trondheim & Garcia have carefully shown us the branch before so we see where Roselita gets it (notice that the figure of her running, right before the second time she approaches the boat, is actually seeing it by the side of the path as she races along the path) -- we can even surmise that the branch blew off the tree stump that the beaver is reading under right across the road. Notice the animals creeping among the rocks in the center of the page.

Look at the expressions on the (very simply drawn) character's faces: look at the sadness that Deuzio has in his final appearance on the page as he asks himself if he prefers to be alone; look at the thoughtful uncertainty of Robert as he follows an angry, anxious and still, above all, greedy Jonh Mc Mac; look at Roselita's childlike joy as she imagines that she might marry her "knight".

I like the way that Trondheim & Garcia use the space of the page as well: lots of cartoonists will use the occasional multiple, superimposed figures within a panel, but creating an entire comic out of superimposed figures -- in what could be seen, if it could only be laid out, as a single, endless panel*** (or as a print version of Scott McCloud's infinite canvas) -- is something I don't think I've seen before.

There are eight figures each of John Mc Mac, Robert and Deuzio on this page; there are thirteen of Rosalita. Yet her story fairly clearly takes no more time than theirs: to the limited degree that the question has any definitive answer, time seems to march evenly across the page (yet her path bends: doesn't it take therefore more time? It's longer...). This inequality, incidentally, is by no means regular; I haven't counted the others, but most of the pages seem more balanced (although, in the few I checked, never exactly even). -- Perhaps it signifies the speed she runs as she races down along the bend? Or perhaps it merely looks better? (That is to say: it does look better; that's presumably why they did it -- but is that all of it?)

Trondheim and Garcia also fill the page with other marvelous bits with no particular relevance to their story -- visual digressions (so to speak) which are the soul of their wit. In the bottom-left corner, we see a monkey showing a group of animals their location on a map (so far as I can tell, the story roughly parallels the outline shown -- although they soon cross an ocean, and so go off the map's borders -- but basically this is extraneous to the tale, just for fun). In the bottom-right corner, two pirates wait along a road (after a fork at which Roselita chooses the other direction): they don't show up again (although different pirates do): they're simply there for fun. (Notice the alligator is biting the large bird's leg; and that the opossum has some sort of guidebook in its hands.) The same with the family of ducks hanging out in the cluster of rocks behind the pirates, or the various animals in the larger, central cluster of rocks, or any of the many animals by the various paths. I particularly like the animal (a beaver?) with the eyeglasses and the book resting against the tree stump that Roselita's path snakes around in the middle of page four. (And the owl right above it is ferocious.)

Note that while the paths sometimes clearly occupy the same space -- the entire middle section when Roselita races around to try to rescue Deuzio, or both the moments when the boat goes under a bridge are examples -- they don't always occupy the same space. This is easiest to see on this page on the far left-top (Roselita and John Mc Mac's paths) and on the far-right bottom (the same): the white space between them is deliberately ambiguous, and it's not at all as simple or clear as the two paths simply running beside each other: they are each simply in their own narrative space, a space which might solidify into physical space if Trondheim and Garcia wish the paths to interact but which otherwise are linked only by their placement on the page.

As with many of the pages I've discussed in this series, what finally sells this page is a hard (if not impossible) to articulate, but utterly crucial, sense of design. Not all great comics pages have this (some simply work because all their constituent panels work, relying on the invisibility of the standard grid for their overall design); but those pages that are self-consciously crafted as pages have it. The second double page of Les Trois Chemins has it in spades -- as, indeed, the rest of the work does as well.

Just looking at the overall structure is impressive in this regard. Scroll back up to the thumbnail, and look at it without clicking to enlarge it (which I hope that, before the previous section of the post, you did). Squint and just look at the flow of the paths. Each of the paths flows slightly differently -- yet with enough parallel and balance to make the whole work. The top path arcs down, as if one strand of the bottom of a sideways Caduceus -- except that the far extension to the left is a different path, since the bottom two paths cross earlier. The lower path swoops down and up and down again, its belated fork both adding a fun twist to the overall page, a balance to the crossing, an opportunity for complexity otherwise lost, and a note of Robert Frostian realism. Also note (and you might need to click through the larger version to see this) the way in which the third major section of Roselita's path bends right before bending back to the left for its upward peak -- a sort of hint at an S shape that, again, adds a lot to the sheer balance of the page.

And of course that description leaves out the rocks in the central circle, the animal lesson, the figures, the subtle array of colors -- all the elements that really make the design work.

A number of the comics I've excerpted from so far have been Great Works, serious in tone and intent. Les Trois Chemins is simpler than that -- a children's story filled with delight. But even in a children's work, there can be powerful innovation -- as in this comics' playing with reading order and time; and even in a children's work, there can be craft and art and, yes, beauty.

Just with a lot of light hearted fun added in as well.

Even if your French is as shaky as mine, you'll definitely enjoy it; for that matter, I suspect that it's fairly enjoyable even if you can't read a word. And certainly if you can read children's French fluently, it will be a true delight. (If you want to find a copy, it may help you to know that the ISBN for Les Trois Chemins is 2840554615. It only seems to be available as a used book in the U.S.; but Amazon's Canadian version has it in stock new, and there's always interlibrary loan.)

And hey, maybe if we make enough noise, someone will put out a translation.

Incidentally there's a sequel called Les Trois Chemins sous les mers ("The Three Ways Under the Sea"), which was published in 2003, though I've never seen a copy. You can see a sample page here; judging by that, plus the cover, it seems to be a very similar idea with different characters and settings. Those seem to be the only two volumes in the series to date.


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* Which means, incidentally, that you should take any translations I offer in this post as (to put it kindly) preliminary. I've almost certainly got some of them wrong.

** Comics for kids are great for practicing languages one knows only poorly: the pictures help, and the language is both simple and colloquial.

*** Perhaps it's obvious, but I should note that each page begins where the previous one ended: if you bought enough copies of the book, you could line them all up to make a grand, single banner, like a children's Bayeux Tapestry (though the page links would be obvious, since nothing happens at precisely those moments, to allow the reader to turn the page).

100 Great Pages: Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby, page 131

Eleventh of a series of posts about 100 great comics pages.
Links to: an introduction to the series; an index of posts by creator; an index of posts by title.

Howard Cruse's extraordinary Stuck Rubber Baby is one of my very favorite graphic novels. In fact, I've written about it at length before, describing my experiences teaching it in an undergraduate seminar (on historical fiction) here at Cornell. But of course that's not going to stop me from including it in this series (which will produce a very different sort of post, after all).

Stuck Rubber Baby is semi-autobiographical, but if you read Cruse's long and richly interesting web site about the process of writing it, you'll see that the "semi" is very much warranted: it's grounded in his experiences but it isn't a narrative of those experiences: it's very much fiction.

Stuck Rubber Baby might be reasonably described as a coming-out novel. The basic arc of the story is the gradual realization by Toland Park (Cruse's protagonist) that he's gay -- or, more accurately, his coming to accept this fact about himself as true and immutable. It's set at a time -- the early 1960's, "Kennedytime", as Cruse calls it -- when attitudes towards gays was almost unimaginably far from what they are today: jumping that gap, feeling the differences down in your bones, is one of the hardest tasks in thinking historically -- and one of the reasons that I find historical fiction valuable as a teaching tool (and one of the reasons I taught Stuck Rubber Baby specifically). Cruse invokes the social, psychological, and personal complexities extremely well (and -- insofar as I can judge a period about a decade before my birth, which I know only second-hand through study -- accurately).

But there are more historical complexities at work in Stuck Rubber Baby than simply the distance traveled by gay and lesbian citizens in the intervening decades. Stuck Rubber Baby takes place in a fictionalized version of Birmingham, Alabama -- a city that was the focus point of the Civil Rights Movement in 1963 (from SCLC's campaign there that spring to the KKK's terrorist bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church that September). Toland Park -- like Cruse -- is white; but for this very reason his perspective on the movement is a fascinating one.* Toland is sympathetic but clueless: well-intentioned, but not someone whose normal tendency would be to get deeply involved.

(It occurs to me that I may be making Stuck Rubber Baby sound dull, if all this talk of historical settings and psychistoriocial who-dads and so forth sound that way to you. Fear not! Unless you're in my class, no one will make you notice: the book is a gripping tale -- a "page turner" as Amanda Marcotte recently put it -- that will educate you without you noticing it at all. Unless, of course, you care to pay attention. (Nor is it at all preachy; its politics come out simply through its story, and are richly integrated into the complexities of real people's lives.))

The richness of the historical setting is one of the reasons I adore this book; the other is the richness of the characters. Cruse's characters are marvelously complex, flawed, likeable, fully human people. (I keep wanting to say they're "well-drawn", which is true, but means something different when talking about a graphic novel.) At least a dozen of his characters are fully realized individuals; many of the secondary characters are vivid as well. These characters are black and white, straight and gay, male and female, active in the movement, sympathetic but detached, and even fairly hostile. Historical fiction works by embodying the complexities of history in the equally complex but very differently textured realities of individual lives: and that's why Stuck Rubber Baby works so well.

And Cruse can also really lay out a page.

Stuck Rubber Baby's pages are crowded: Cruse's book is filled with pages with twelve or more panels, all with lots of words. "Decompression" this is not. But Cruse makes them work, because his sense of balance and pacing and design are all so good. Many of his pages are -- "merely", if "merely" is the word -- extremely good: clear, compelling pages which draw the reader along, laying out the story in the clear, unobtrusive way of clear prose: like untinted glass, you don't notice the artistry because you're so busy looking at what's through the window. But some of his pages show a bit more extravagant flair: and, yeah, you guessed it, those are some of my favorites.**

Page 131 is almost two-thirds of the way through the graphic novel. (It doesn't spoil any of the major surprises in the book, although I will spoil a fairly minor one.) On this page, Toland Park is looking for Anna Dellyne and, having told she was at the hospital, goes to find her. (Anna is tangentially involved in a personal problem of Toland's, but I won't say any more so as not to spoil it -- you don't need to know any more for this page, anyway.) Anna Dellyne is the wife of Revered Harland Pepper, who is the leader of the movement in the book's fictional city of Clayfield. (You could say he was sort of a Martin Luther King character -- except that simply betrays the fact that our culture has far too simple a memory of the Civil Rights Movement: there were a larger number of preachers involved in the Movement, of whom Dr. King was only the most famous.***) Anna Dellyne is a famous former blues singer (in the Billie Holiday mode) who doesn't sing any more: she gave up singing in public when she married and quit her career. Hence Toland's surprise when he gets to the hospital room (one of the characters in the book was injured in the bombing that is the book's fictional equivalent of the real-life terrorist attack on the 16th St. Baptist Church) and hears her singing to the unconscious Shiloh Reed:

(Click for larger version)

It's worth noting that this page contains much of what makes Stuck Rubber Baby so wonderful (in the way that a steak contains cow, of course: it's just a bit of it, sliced away from the rest of it so that it's hard to recognize, but still: easier to serve). The historical events of the Civil Rights Movement are here, in their fictionalized form: the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church was a major event in the movement's history, and here we see -- in the wounded, unconscious body of Shiloh Reed -- the price that the Movement required, whose sheer pain and horror is too often downplayed in our current sanitized memory of it. At the same time, this is very much a page about Toland: he's a dreamy figure, given to longings he can't quite identify (or is simply afraid to), and his fantasy of having been back at one of Anna Dellyne's performances is very much in character.

The most obvious feature of this page -- that is, obvious when looking at it, and looking for it: like many obvious solutions, it was (I suspect) devilishly hard to actually think up; and like many of comics' fictive devices, easy to assimilate almost unconsciously if you're not paying attention -- are the forms of the panels. Cruse draws Toland's fantasy images in circular panels -- well, almost circular: their actually sort of spirals, with each having a pair of little tails flowing counter-clockwise. I don't know if this shape has a name, or why Cruse chose it over plain ovals -- although the tails do effectively capture the movement and flow of the music (much as the lettering does, see below) in a way that simple curves would not: they'd set it off from the other panels, but they wouldn't help it seem to flow. I presume that's what they're for.

But the curve of the shape serves the other purpose: to visually set off the imaginative scenario from the real one. As I said, if you're not looking for it, you might barely notice it, but it will still serve to mark off the fantasy from reality in a clarifying way. Notice that Cruse goes so far as to make the little panel of Toland and the nurses in the middle of the second tier rectangular, so as to strictly adhere to the distinction. Further, while the image of Anna Dellyne in the lower left bursts out of her panel, the actual panel itself remains circular: look at the shape of the panel around the horn player's head, continuing the tails from the previous tier (this time going clockwise though -- presumably just for design purposes); look also at the shape of the panel at the very bottom of the page, next to Anna Dellyne's shoulder: again, curved. (Even Dellyne's head fits this pattern, although it does go beyond the normal boundaries, since her hair itself is drawn as sort of a curve.)

Let's stick with the curve theme for the moment, and notice the other curved shapes on this page: the lettering of the lyrics that Anna Dellyne's singing. This is most obviously true on the second tier, where they run around the outside of the two curved panels, each its own semi-circle. (And how perfect to have them outside the panels, by the way! If they were in the fantasy panels, their reality in the hospital room would be lost; if they were in just the hospital panels, we wouldn't sense them in the fantasy. By drawing them on the white page between the panels (along with the "note" emanata signifying singing) Cruse manages to have them wrap through both the real and the imaginary seamlessly.) But of course the singing in the third tier, and in the first tier are curved too: in fact, look at the latter closely: even the second half of the words ("your soul is under lock and key") are curved -- in a wave shape for the third line -- and although it's subtle, it's very definitely there.

This curving of lettering is a device that Cruse uses sparingly but deftly throughout the book. In addition to singing, he uses it to signify emotionally distressing memory (p. 63, another page I considered writing on) and for some of the lines of Sammy -- an openly gay man -- when he's being self-consciously fabulous (e.g. page 41: y'all are with Sammy Noone, you might as well be here with royalty: the final word is in a lovely upward arc.) Cruse is not a flashy letterer the way that Eisner or Sim are; but he uses this particular device well. Here, it helps capture the feel of music in static, silent words. It's a wonderful touch.

While I'm on the subject, I should note the lyrics themselves:

You may try forgetting me
But you will not succeed.
Your soul is under lock and key,
And it will not be freed.
You'll always be a part of me,
Forever in the heart of me.
You may have left me before
But you can't leave me behind.

These lyrics were written by Cruse himself; this was true not only because he would need to quote too much of them to fall within fair use limits, but also because, as he said, "I needed them to convey thoughts specifically related to the subtexts of the scenes that featured them." So we definitely should look at the lyrics. The themes here apply to all sorts of different aspects of this page and this novel. The entire work is narrated by Toland as a much older man, so the most obvious meaning of the words is Toland's relationship to his past: it'll always be a part of him; he can't leave it behind. (This meaning is, in fact, explicitly drawn out towards the end of the book.) It equally applies to Anna Dellyne's past, of course: she may not be a nightclub singer any more, she may not perform save to sick friends and eavesdropping nurses, but that past is part of her, and she can't leave it behind.

But that only scratches the surface, of course. You can read the lyrics in so many ways. They speak about Toland's sexuality: he can try forgetting it, but he will not succeed: he is gay, not straight, whatever dreams of "curing" himself he may be hanging onto. Then there's the Civil Rights Movement -- how many ways do the lyrics apply to that! Anna Dellyne is singing at the bedside of a man gravely injured in the terrorist violence that opposed the movement; but is the implication that the dark racism that produced such violence will always be a part of our past -- or that the heroism that confronted and overcame it will be? Is it about the Movement and its triumphant place in our past? Or is it about the place of African Americans in the United States, that they are integral to the meaning and culture of this country however much some white Americans have wanted to (in the not only evil but historically imbecilic phrase from the time, quoted in the book) "Keep Dixie White"? The indelibility of the past, the inability to change the fundamental truths about who one is -- these apply both to Toland as an individual and to America as a nation, and the lyrics here are about both.

They're also beautiful, marvelous lyrics, I think. Someone should make them into an actual song.****

Let's return to the issue of the visuals of the page. One thing you can see here is Cruse's amazing, painstaking hatching that he uses on every page. He uses this sort of hatching to richly color the skin of all his characters -- not only black, but white as well, in a way that more accurately conveys the realities of rich, multiple skin tones. (I owe this point to Alison Bechdel, who discusses it in her book The Indelible Alison Bechdel. (More on Bechdel when I get around to doing an entry in this series about a page from her work!)) You can't quite see the way he uses it on white characters all that well on this particular page -- but look at Toland's neck in the first panel. It's a good device, to keep from falling into the trap of only "coloring" black characters (as in Franklin in Charles Schultz's Peanuts.)†

And of course the hatching isn't used only on skin: look at the shadows on the wall sin the third panel, or the bed clothes or Anna Dellyne's dress in the same image. Look at the Ceiling and floor in the bottom tier once Toland goes back out to the waiting room. That extremely labor-intensive use of hatching to create shadow, shade and shape is part of what make's Cruse's art in this book work so well (and part of what makes his style so distinctive).

Another masterful panel is the panel between the two central circular ones, with Toland listening from the doorway along with the various nurses. There is so much to like about this panel. First, there's Cruse's use of the doorframe (you can see it in context in panel three on tier one) as a panel border. This both makes the panel's integration into its tier work better -- it helps it not look artificial superimposed on the other panels -- but, in fact, it makes the entire middle tier feel like the room: the doorway is set in a wall, just as it is in panel three, which makes the rest of the tier the room itself; Toland is looking into the room and seeing his imagined image. Second, Cruse's choice to present the nurses here in silhouette is masterful. It's not that he's hesitant to draw them -- we see them quite clearly in the first three panels of the page -- but here it helps emphasize that Toland is off in his own world, with nothing between him and the music. Cruse couldn't show Toland alone -- it wouldn't fit the scene, where he is in fact crowding behind others at the door -- but this helps us capture his emotional state in which he sees past them to commune with the song. Third, the fact that the panel doesn't end but fades out -- something that Cruse's hatching is especially well-suited to do -- helps the atmosphere of timeless enjoyment saturate even this return to the "real" world: it's not bounded, physically, and that affects how we read it.

Finally, the last brilliant touch in this panel is the smoke snaking across it, originating from the first circular panel and leading us into the third. Obviously the smoke is not "really" there: it's part of Toland's imagined scene. But it helps connect the imagined scenes to the small interjection of reality. It creates a thread tying together (almost as if it were the music itself) the three panels (particularly with the smoke's continuation (or it's new smoke perhaps, who cares) in panel three, making it look as if it is just running behind Anna Dellyne in that panel. Without this smoke, this inset panel might well look odd and out of place; with it, it is tied tightly into the scene.

Let's look at that fantasy scene another minute -- in particular the second of the two circular panels on the middle tier. The man sitting in the bottom front is Shiloh: healed, well, dressed in a suit. Behind him is Toland -- also in a suit ("conservative clothes" as Cruse calls them (in a different context) on page 33). And then, beside Toland, is a woman. It's not his girlfriend; it doesn't look anything like her. We don't know for sure that she's with Toland rather than just sitting beside him. But Toland's fantasies (as we see elsewhere in the book) are intimately tied up with his fantasy that he might become straight. And while another character in another book might imagine being in an nightclub as a freeing experience -- releasing him from society's restrictions, allowing him to experience his sexuality freely and without guilt -- so that the phrase "what kind of a different life would I have been living..." would have referred to his having been openly gay, I think the meaning here is clearly the opposite. Toland is using the fantasy of having been back in Harlem to indulge in a fantasy of himself as straight: the woman in his imagined scene is, I think, with him -- not clingy with him; Toland isn't, in fact, straight so why would he imagine that? But she's a part of his self-denial, right in front of us, on the page.

I like how the fantasy begins in images before it begins in words -- in fact at a moment when the words are explicitly denying it: "it wasn't like she was on a stage" the narration says, as Toland is seeing (and we are seeing) her already on a stage, with a microphone.

Returning to the issue of panel shapes, look at the three panels on the right-hand side of the bottom tier. They increase slowly in size: the first panel, as Toland waits for a timeless period (as Scott McCloud notes in Understanding Comics, silent panels often have a "timeless" feel to them), then Anna Dellyne shows up. The increase in size goes along with a change in his mood: the small size is associated with the sense of being lost in wonder (given that it's the same size as the that middle tier panel), hence his disconnection with reality: as the panel size increases, as we see more clearly (and the panels begin to resemble the "normal" sized panels elsewhere in the book) Toland is drawn back into the complex, even sordid, world of his ordinary life. Cruse may well have made the panels those shapes simply to fit in with the drawing on the left, and to make room for the middle panel up top; but it still has this effect just the same. (And who knows? He might have meant it to. Trying to read an author, or an artist's, mind is well-known to be folly; this is why.)

I also like the transition from the fantasy to the scene in the waiting room. The use of the large close-up, with its bleed off the page, culminates Toland's absorbtion in the music: he is wholly taken by it, there is no defined end... and then rather than showing him leave, Cruse simply jumps to his waiting by himself in the room. (I called that panel timeless a moment a go, and in some ways it is... but if you look closely you can actually see Anna Dellyne in it, just a silhouette, but clearly her, and moving towards Toland, which makes the panel slightly less timeless (although, again, that feel is still there) and also ties it in with the previous moment.)

And while I can't quite express why this page -- full as it is -- still works as a whole: balanced, clear, one might easily read it quickly, absorbed in the story, hardly noticing the artistry.

This page is a quiet moment in an eventful work: between the lives of Toland and his friends, and the historic events that are their backdrop and which filter in and out of the narrative,†† there's a lot going on in this book. In fact, one of the few genuine criticisms that my students raised, and that I sort of agreed with, is that they would have liked the work to be longer: several plot thread, particularly involving minor characters are closed rather quickly, and it'd be nice to see some of their fates work out at greater length. Cruse was pressed for space in its construction: he had agreed on 200 pages, got an extension to 210, but was still working within tight limits. So why not cut this page? In terms of "plot" Toland could just as well have caught up with Anna Dellyne and began their conversation without this interlude.

Much of the answer -- perhaps all of the answer -- is that it is thematically important: the themes of self-realization, of hiding versus being open about who you are, of the genuine and painful cost of resistance -- all of these are important to the work and more than justify its inclusion. But it also serves as a quiet, personal moment: a moment of beauty -- for the characters, and for us -- in the midst of larger issues of struggle and identity and power. Cruse takes his time here, and as I hope I have showed puts a lot of work and thought into its careful construction. It is the elegance of its small moments, as much as the sweep of its grander themes, that make this book as extraordinary as it is. If page 131 wasn't this good, Stuck Rubber Baby wouldn't be half the work that it is; but it is this good -- and so is the rest of it. I couldn't recommend it more highly.

Post Script: Oh, and the title "Stuck Rubber Baby"? It's one of those titles (the other example I always think of is Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49") that make absolutely no sense until you get to the point of the novel which clarifies them... after which they seem so self-evident that you can't quite recapture how strange they are. Believe me, it makes perfect sense. If you don't see it now... read the book. You won't believe you missed it.

Update: A shout-out to Howard Cruse, who links to this post on his own blog. He includes a link to the Amazon.com page for Stuck Rubber Baby -- a good idea, I should probably do that myself in this series. It also reminded me that Cruse has this teaser on his site, which is a nice little introduction to the book.

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* As I've mentioned before, the perspective of whites on the Civil Rights Movement is getting more study from historians these days -- a good thing, I think (but then I would think that: it's close to my own area of study). If you're interested in historians' works, two books I'd recommend are Jason Sokol's There Goes My Everything (full disclosure: I've met Jason, and we're friendly) and Kevin Kruse's White Flight (a somewhat more specialized study, but equally interesting). Still, fiction is often the best way to learn -- and Cruse's book, too, is a marvelous place to start.

** Actually, the page I'm talking about isn't quite in my top five, say, because many of the most spectacular pages come around central plot points I'm reluctant to spoil. So while I (obviously) like the page I chose a lot, there are some still more spectacular ones that I might have otherwise written about. (If you've read the book, you'll know at least some of the ones I mean -- look especially at chapters 19, 21 and 22.)

*** Go watch the Blackside documentary television series Eyes on the Prize sometime -- you should anyway: it's one of the finest things ever to appear on television, a superb history of the Civil Rights Movement, both historically important and also simply gripping on a narrative level; and now that it is finally available on DVD, it should be easier to actually see -- and you'll see a huge number of ministers (largely from SCLC) interviewed -- Rev. Andrew Young, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Rev. C. T. Vivian, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, etc., etc. They all played important roles. So did a lot of other people. It not only does history a disservice to remember the Movement as equivalent to King, it does progressive reform a disservice too, since it encourages us to wait for Leaders to Lead, when that is a gross distortion of how change has happened in the past.

**** Incidentally, on the above-cited page, Cruse also says that "For those lyrics... no actual tunes exist (yet)". I can't say for sure, but this seems to imply that he'd be open to the idea of someone writing music for them. Any blues musicians out there, take note!

† No disrespect to the extraordinary artist Charles Schultz intended.

†† This is a dual effect. In part, Cruse shows that (as the Old Masters know of suffering), history takes place "while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along". But he also shows it affecting lives -- not only in the big, obvious ways -- now African Americans and gay or lesbian citizens can lead freer lives than before -- but in the small, multiple ways: people altering their life this way or that (getting a job or loosing one; moving somewhere or leaving it) around its currents.

100 Great Pages: J T Waldman's Megillat Esther, page 84

Tenth of a series of posts about 100 great comics pages.
Links to: an introduction to the series; an index of posts by creator; an index of posts by title.

"Megillat Esther" is the Hebrew term for the Biblical book of Esther ("Megillat" means "scroll"); and it's the title that JT Waldman uses for his 2005 graphic novel version of it. (Throughout this piece I'll use "Esther" to mean the biblical book and "Megillat Esther" to mean the graphic novel). Megillat Esther isn't, strictly speaking, an adaptation of Esther into comics form -- because it's not quite right to say it's an adaptation: the entire text is presented, in Hebrew, as well as in English in Waldman's own original translation,* and it seems not quite right to say that something is an "adaptation" when the original is fully present. But Waldman's version isn't simply an illustrated translation either: it's much more centered in its visual presentation than that would imply.

Waldman's own term for what he's done is "midrash". On his own web site, Waldman defines midrash thusly:

Midrash is the name for the process and body of work that interprets and expands stories from the Bible.... Midrash fills the gaps or holes within the biblical narrative. Unexplained changes in continuity, peculiar grammatical syntax and other strange phenomenon in the Bible are addressed through Midrash.

As Waldman suggests, "Midrash" can refer to both a specific set of texts -- the canonical Midrash from the Talmud, Midrash Rabbah and elsewhere -- and to a type of storytelling which has continued into modern times. Waldman is not adapting Esther -- the whole text is there: he's using the comics medium to engage in midrash on it.

Waldman engages in midrash in multiple ways. Simply by illustrating the story, he engages in midrash -- adding details, suggestively rewriting passages, finding hidden treasures of story where the Biblical text only suggested. Much of this is original to Waldman himself, but other elements are in fact drawn from the earlier midrashic tradition, with Waldman showing visually details which are in the midrash but not in the basic text of Esther. The visual elements drawn from earlier sources Waldman dutifully footnotes -- including the notes right in the art, which I've never seen before, although he manages to make it quite unobtrusive (indeed, they're easy to miss entirely.)**

In addition to those varieties of midrashim, Waldman adds ten different passages that he terms "interludes", which are more explicit midrashim on the story, ones which are more personal and less grounded in earlier tradition, although even here they often (always?) have some grounding in the earlier midrashic texts. These are often in a humorous vein, such as putting Biblical characters into the vernacular of a modern game show. Others of these are simply inclusions biblical passages which the Midrash connect to Esther. One of my favorites of these, however, is a visual retelling of this Midrash:

Timna, a princess of Hor, yearned to join the tribe of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but they did not accept her. So she went to Esau and said, "I would rather be a servant to your people than a princess of another nation." Esau heeded her request and gave her to his son Eliphaz as a concubine. Timna then bore Amalek, he who greatly afflicted Israel. And why did this come to pass? Because the patriarchs should not have rejected her for not reason. (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 99b)

This Midrash is retold purely visually, in five stark, silent pages right at the beginning of Megillat Esther. Esther as a biblical book is rather triumphalist, including a rather nasty piece of preventative (in the just-war-theory-sense) slaughter which may be justified but is rather horrible to celebrate. But the Jews also have a very admirable tradition of self-criticism, and by placing this wonderful midrash at the front of his book Waldman places himself explicitly in that tradition.

So far as I can tell, JT Waldman is a first-time graphic novelist (and Megillat Esther took him seven years, so I suspect it'll be a while before we see a second from him.) But he's an extremely talented comics artist, and his book is a visual feast: I bought it on sight because I was simply bowled over by how visually rich the work was.

Megillat Esther got a lot of attention from Jewish media (magazines, newspapers, blogs) -- but not as much, that I've seen, from comics media, despite it's back-cover plugs from Will Eisner and Scott McCloud. I'd heard of it before coming across it (at the always-fabulous Harvard Book Store's (deducibly-but-also-actually) fabulous graphic novel section), but it really hadn't gotten the sort of attention that work of this caliber should be getting. Of course, it was published by JPS (the Jewish Publication Society) rather than, say, Drawn & Quarterly or D.C.; and I think it was marketed accordingly. But it's a shame, and while it is, indeed, a work with deep and rich roots in the Jewish tradition -- one which will interest anyone seriously engaged with that tradition*** -- it's also a simply terrific graphic novel, and one I recommend to fans of the form (and, really, to almost everyone: it's purely and simply a great book.)

The book also has one other feature that I feel impelled to mention, an interesting attempt to make not only the visuals of the book, not only the layout of a page, but even the physical experience of the book as an object contribute to the narrative experience. Halfway thought, you get a crazy page (as the King dreams) which is topsy-turvy: to read it you have to flip the book upside down. And then, for the second half, the book proceeds backwards. Instead of turning pages right to left, moving from the left-hand cover towards the right-hand cover, you begin turning the pages left to right, moving from the right-hand cover towards the left-hand one. Reading in this direction can be disorienting if you're not used to it, although readers might be familiar with it, since a number of books are created to be read that way. Two types are particularly relevant here: books in Hebrew are read "backwards" (relative to English speaker's expectations), since of course Hebrew itself is read right to left, and thus the opposite order on the larger scale follows; and, in the world of comics, Japanese manga are read in a way that is to English speakers backwards since Japanese, like Hebrew, is read tfel ot thgir. For manga, this affects the pictures to: series of panels are read right to left just as the text is; and in the second half of Waldman's graphic novel, the pictures, like the pages, are read in the opposite direction than in the first half. ****

It's an intriguing device, an interesting attempt to bring the physicality of the book to bear on the emotion and texture of the story.

But the page I want to talk about, page 84, comes (just) before the switch (which occurs at chapter 6, verse 1 -- halfway through the book), and therefore reads in the familiar, left-to-right fashion of ordinary English-language comics.

Page 84 is the beginning of chapter 5 -- the first half of verse 1. In the 1985 Jewish Publication Society translation, Esther 5:1 reads:

On the third day, Esther put on royal apparel and stood in the inner court of the king's palace, facing the king's palace, while the king was sitting on his royal throne in the throne room facing the entrance of the palace.

It's a dramatic moment in the story, when, after a three-day preparatory fast, Esther goes to the King (breaking the law by approaching him unsummoned), as prodded by her uncle Mordecai, hoping to beg, beguile or seduce him into saving the Jewish people from the genocide the King's advisor Haman has planned. Here's how Waldman illustrates the moment:

(Click for larger version.)

In the beginning was the word, as the Distinguished Competition says, so let's start with the language: the Hebrew on the page corresponds to the words "On the third day, Esther put on royal apparel and stood in the inner court of the king's palace...". But while the rest of the Hebrew verse continues on the next page, the illustrations/English on page 85 are already dealing with the text of verse 2 ("As soon as the king saw Queen Esther standing in the court, she won his favor"), the Hebrew of which is also on page 85. Thus while the English words on page 84 are a more-or-less literal translation of the Hebrew words also on the page, the second half of verse five ("...facing the king's palace, while the king was sitting on his royal throne in the throne room facing the entrance of the palace") is shown only in the illustrations (even though, again, the Hebrew text appears to be complete). The Hebrew is thus not always perfectly aligned with the illustrations/English, although it's close.

Visually, the most striking thing about this page is probably Waldman's use of the tree as the organizing structure of the page, with its trunk melding into the archway where Esther stands "facing the King's palace". It's a wonderful design, which lends a marvelous unity and balance to the page, the atmosphere of calm within a larger narrative tension. Why a tree? I'm not entirely sure: it may simply be that Waldman decided, rightly, that it looked cool. But there are other reasons too. As a frontpiece to the work -- even before the title page -- is a (partial) family tree, with the names placed on the literal image of a tree, showing how various characters -- Mordechai, Esther, Haman -- are related to the first patriarch, Abraham. (The relation of Haman to Abraham is of course through Esau, based on the aforementioned midrash from Sanhedrin 99b.) This image is recalled by the tree's use on page eighty-four. And it is of course precisely this familial connection -- in the larger sense of a people, a tribe -- that Mordechai has called on to get Esther to go to the king: she, too, is a Jew (even though no one knows that), and she has responsibilities to her people. So the notion of Esther's roots is very much tied up with this moment, and thus the tree's use as an organizing device has thematic resonance in addition to simple visual elegance.

The top two-thirds of the page show Esther's preparations over the three days in which she has given herself to prepare (asking the entire Jewish community to fast as she does, presumably as a sort of prayer, although it's not spelled out). On the top tier (the panel order is still quite clear despite the use of tree-branches as gutters) we see her fasting: dancing, bathing, laughing (along with her chorus of maidens who follow her around through this part of the story like it was a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta). This is all midrash on the notion that she "put on royal apparel": this is a big moment, and we see her treating it as such.

It's also worth noting the stylized suns in panels two and four (as well as on the second tier, in panel six, where the sun (wonderfully!) doubles as a window on the wall in Esther's room), as well as the stylized stars in panels one, three and five. These are not meant as literal representations: the stars are in a semi-circle, the sun in a semi-circle bending in the opposite way. But even the highly symbolic sun and stars work quite well: they note the passing of time and they add pleasing elements to the design (with the alternating curvatures of the stars and the sun lending a nice element to the page too).

Most dramatic, perhaps, is the fifth panel, in the upper-right-hand corner of the page. there we see Esther the night before she is to approach the king crying, terrified -- being comforted by one of her maidens at a moment when her nerve is breaking. It's a terrific touch: Esther is (as she points out to Mordechai on the previous page) breaking the law, risking her life, to go to the king. Of course she'd be scared... but it's not made explicit in the story (and to my knowledge not in any Midrash either; at least Waldman doesn't cite any for this particular page). It forces us to reinterpret the previous image as well: the rejoicing with her maidens is not simple partying, but rather a desperate, over-the-top attempt to keep her fear and trepidation away -- an attempt that fails in the end, as her spirit momentarily quails. This is a marvelous example of what I mean when I say that Waldman is doing midrash on the biblical text: Esther, like much of the bible, is written in a very spare, almost minimalist style: not much time is spent on character development or private emotional moments. So here Waldman shows us one: the three days of preparation, and how Esther, momentarily, lost it.

But only for a moment. On the second tier we see her making her final preparations the day before, adjusting her hair before a mirror, a bowl and pestle (for make-up?). Then we see her staring out the window: she was -- again one is tempted to say of course -- ready too soon. She has to wait for the right time. So she stairs moodily out the window, perhaps ruminating on the risk she is taking, perhaps preparing herself mentally for whatever she will have to go through, or perhaps simply checking the time by the moon to see if the moment is ripe.

And then, finally, we see her standing there -- "in the inner court of the king's palace, facing the king's palace, while the king was sitting on his royal throne in the throne room facing the entrance of the palace". She grounds the page: all the preparation are rooted in the necessity of this moment, they are all preparation for this. The instant is drawn straight-on, with the classical perspective strongly highlighted by the tiling on the floor. The outer columns of the courtyard frame the panel in the way that the tree branches did the upper panels: now Esther has left the comforting, natural roots of her maidens and has come to the cold, stone world of the king. Inside are more columns; and inside, smaller still is the king.

The king is slumped to his right (leaning is a traditional prerogative of kings in Jewish folklore, which is why you're supposed to lean at a seder, since on Passover everyone is royalty); it also is the only departure in the middle-bottom of the page from the absolutely balanced, renaissance-style order -- one which keeps it from being too ordered and too dull. The figure of the king is quite small -- when he wants to Waldman is perfectly willing to use (and capable of using) very tiny figures† -- but his body language is still quite clear: he is bored. And he's lonely: the book of Esther starts off with his exiling his earlier queen and then regretting it, and Esther's judgment about when to approach him is clearly quite good.

The words, of course, are central to the design here: the Hebrew is inscribed (white against dark hatching) on the trunk of the tree, their English translation on the floor of the court. There are fewer words on this page than on many (although more than on some), but still they're very prominent: Waldman does not shy away from using the look of his words as part of his design, of making them things not simply superimposed on an image, but that contribute to the image itself. (Waldman, incidentally, did the Hebrew calligraphy along with the translation and the art; but the English lettering was done by Elisha Solmes.) Using the two types of letters help tie together the two backgrounds: the wood and the stone, the private world of Esther and the cold public world of the court. They also help fill up the page: Waldman's pages are stuffed full; -- not overfull (at least I never find them so), but they're rich, with lots happening everywhere. Part of this is because of his decision to include the text in two languages along with his images: it demands a busy style, since it's simply a lot to get in. But he uses the lettering as part of the drawing (often far more literally and directly than here), and it ends up balancing his art very well.

What about the two figures in the bottom-right and bottom-left corners -- what's up with them? They, it turn out, are part of a parallel story, a sort of harmony that runs in parallel throughout chapter five (which, like many such devices Waldman uses, helps give chapter five its own visual unity and distinctiveness). Throughout the seven pages devoted to the chapter,†† Waldman devotes the lower corners of each page to these ongoing narratives. The narratives are silent, save for the Hebrew names on page 84, which are finally given their English equivalents on page 90 at the side-stories' end: that's Bezalel on the left and Joshua on the right. Their appearances on page eighty-for is simply designed to introduce the characters, whose tales are then told by their appearances on the remaining six pages of the chapter.

Hold on. Joshua, of course, is the eponymous character from the sixth book of the Hebrew bible, the successor to Moses. But who is "Bezalel", anyway? -- I hear you cry. -- Well, Bezalel is a character from Exodus, who is the architect who builds the tabernacle. -- Okay, but why does Waldman telling us the tales of Bezalel and Joshua in parallel to chapter five of Esther?

That, I have to admit, I'm not sure about. All Waldman says on the matter (in the footnotes) is this: "The juxtaposition of Joshua the Conquerer [sic] and Bezalel the Artist alludes to the decisive action of Esther in chapter 5." (p. 163) Waldman says this as if Joshua and Bezalel are typically contrasted -- but if so, I don't know anything about it. And why chapter five is unclear to me too. (Oh, I could make something up. But I'd be faking it, so I won't.)

Certainly for the purposes of page 84, they work quite well as part of the design. The focus, at the bottom of the page, has to be on Esther and her straight line-of-sight through to the king on his throne: having panels in either corner would be distracting... unless they're clearly separate from the narrative, as here. The strong blacks of Bezalel contrast with the lightness of the panel above it, while the lightness of Joshua contrast with the blackness of Esther's robe in the panel directly above it. So they work very well on this page, even if I personally don't know what they're supposed to mean.

And, anyway, I think it's okay that I don't. As Waldman says, when asked about this (and other motifs) in an interview:

The Midrashic subplots are intended to add layers of depth and context to the Book of Esther. I really enjoyed developing them, but if the reader finds them extraneous they can simply skip over them. I wanted there to be some mystery to my interpretation and not have everything be on the nose. The subplots manifest the mystique of the work.

This is simply one of the mystiques of the work -- an extra element that plays along with the main story, adding (as it were) a harmony to the main melody.

Start again. Another way to look at this page is as all about Esther's hair. We see her, prominently, washing it at the top center of the page; we see her combing it in the panel on the left-hand side of the page; and it is the main focus of our attention when Esther stands before the king with her hair braided to perfection. The hair here stands (as it does in Judaism more generally, and indeed in other religious traditions as well) as a metonymy for beauty and sexual attractiveness, and indeed Esther's hair is part of her voluptuousness which Waldman is not shy about emphasizing. Esther is certainly not drawn in the model-thin-with-breasts-of-silicone style that has, alas, become the stereotype for "sexy" in too many mainstream comics. But she is drawn as alluring -- as she has to be to make the story work -- and, indeed, as self-consciously so. (I also find that her face looks quite conventionally Jewish -- on this page you can see this most clearly in panel four, when she's dancing -- which I think is sort of a nice touch too.) This page is, in many ways, the preparation for a seduction scene -- not a literal one (no sex is shown), but an implied (or anyway symbolic) one, in which Esther gets the king to fall for her in order to save her people.

I should talk at least briefly about Waldman's linework. You can see just on this page a lot of different type of line: the dark, thick hatching that makes up the tree; the stylized parallel lines that form the night sky on the top tier; the detailed lines that make up the human figures throughout; the thicker line that serves to draw Bezalel, and the lines without any sort of hatching that make up the figure of Joshua. There are a lot of different styles on this page -- the highly stylized stars and suns, the marvelous realism of Ester, the abstraction of Bezalel and Joshua.

Waldman is also a master of balance: the darks and the lights, the various figures, the detailed, thick, rich art all serves to make a pleasing, whole pattern, rather than simply the chaotic mess that this much detail and information might make in the hands of lesser draftsman.

Waldman uses a panoply of visual styles -- his various interludes, for example, are drawn rather differently than the main story is; individual chapters will have stylistic unities the rest of the text doesn't; and certain pages are simply wildly different in various exuberant and effective ways. A lot of this art has its visual roots in Jewish sources, as Waldman explains on his web page:

Most of the architecture and design influence [for Megillat Esther] came from the Achamenian period of Persian art from 600 - 400 B.C.E. Other examples include a Renaissance depiction of a scene from the Book of Esther, a 16th century Persian painting, and a 1970s French illustrated Megillat Esther.

(I should emphasize that none of these sources are used at all slavishly or reductively: they are perhaps inspirations and guides, but Waldman's style is, quite clearly, very much his own.)

Given this richness of stylistic variation, it's hard to say what a "typical" page of this graphic novel looks like. But in many ways that page 84 is about as typical of Waldman's style as you can find. (It's greatest divergence is probably that the Hebrew is somewhat less prominent than on many pages -- although there are also totally silent pages, with neither Hebrew nor English, so it's not all that extreme even along this dimension.) And at the very least it is typical in its inventiveness, its visual excitement and interest, and its richness of design and image and thematic motif. And from the pictures of Esther you can get a sense of the way that Waldman draws people, which is always important in how one relates to a comics narrative.

If you look at this page and say, 'Yeah, so what, it's the bible story with some pictures" -- well, then Waldman's work is not for you. But if you find yourself interested by the richness of the design; if you find yourself moved by the story implicit in the partying-against-fear and breakdown in panels four and five; if you find yourself intrigued by the decision to lay the stories of Bezalel and Joshua alongside that of Esther for a chapter -- then seek out Waldman's book. There's far more richness and narrative power and intriguing intertextuality where this came from, and it's all beautifully drawn and thought out, richly attentive to the traditions both of biblical midrash and of the graphic novel. If you like this page, I urge you to seek it out.

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* That is to say: the Hebrew text is, I believe, complete -- although I certainly didn't check it. The English text, however, is definitely partial: some of the "translation" is done through the illustrations rather than through the use of English

** Why bother to footnote? Waldman himself explains, in one of the appendices that follow the main graphic novel, "Why is it Important to Cite Sources" (p. 157):

According to Rabbi Chanina (200 B.C.E.), "Whoever repeats something in the name of one who said it brings redemption to the world." ... This quote connects with verse 2:22 of the Book of Esther, when Esther notifies King Achashverosh in the name of Mordechai of the treachery of the palace. The tradition of citing sources has remained a continuous and integral aspect of rabbinic study for centuries. The inclusion of the rabbinic sources within Megillat Esther locates this book within the framework of rabbinic literature.

Hence footnotes.

*** Although a few of the pictures -- Esther is presented as very much the temptress (as fits with the story) -- may put off those of a more orthodox bent. (Although I'd say it's all pretty strictly PG-13 (or even just PG) -- suggestive not revealing.)

**** In English translations of manga, you find both books that are "flipped" so that the pages read as English-language (and French, and Spanish, etc.) comics do, and ones that are translated and presented as-is. But anyone who reads manga seriously (which I admittedly don't) will certainly have come across the "backward" versions (which I believe are preferred by purists).

† Page nine of Megillat Esther is a wonderful page with well over a hundred panels, of varying sizes but mostly quite small, showing the richness of the king's court. As usual in writing entries for this series, I had many possible pages that I thought of using; page nine was one of them.

†† pp. 84 - 90. Chapter 5 is done comparatively succinctly: Esther has ten chapters, and Megillat Esther is 153 pages long, not counting its (comics) preface, or its textual footnotes, explanations, etc. Even leaving some of those aside for Waldman's midrashic interludes, the chapter adaptations still vary in length, and I think the pages given to chapter five -- well superbly done -- are terser than other parts of the narrative.

100 Great Pages: Neil Gaiman & Charles Vess's Sandman #19, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", p. 13

Ninth of a series of posts about 100 great comics pages.
Links to: an introduction to the series; an index of posts by creator; an index of posts by title.

One of my concerns when I began this series was that the idea behind it was an inherently distorting mechanism: the criteria for 'great pages' only partly overlap those for great comics, and thus this series would necessarily present a distorted slice of the field -- one that would probably omit many great comics -- even some of my very favorites. One of the ways in which the series would distort, I feared (and fear) is that it would privilege comics with dazzlingly beautiful art -- which is not all great comics.

It's as if one were to make a list of great sentences from novels: some novels would lend themselves far more readily to the notion. I do love novels with dazzling, poetic prose -- prose which simply sings on a phrase-by-phrase level -- novels by writers like Proust, Nabokov, Updike. But writers with clean, clear, but less overtly acrobatic prose can be equally good novelists: Jane Austen is a gorgeous writer, but in a quieter way: one which emphasizes character and incident more than dazzling metaphor. But she's at least as good as Proust, Nabokov and Updike. She just does different things.

As a push-back against this, I want to make sure to try and excerpt pages from comics which have art that is good in a clear, clean, crisp sense rather than in a dazzling-with-effects sense. It should be clear by this point that I love fancy page layouts and the like: but there are other great ways of being a great comics page.* Sometimes the art simply helps to present the words clearly and powerfully, rather than dominating our sense of the work.

Which brings me to Neil Gaiman and Sandman.

Sandman was inarguably influential in the comics field -- building on its immediate predecessor (Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing) to be sure; but nevertheless powerfully influential in all sorts of ways, such as pushing American comics publishers to keep trade paperbacks in print (and put them out in the first place), not to mention its precedent-setting cancellation for artistic rather than commercial reasons.

Despite this, however, I feel like Sandman doesn't get quite as much respect in the comics world as it should. I feel at times as if comics fans are divided between proponents of lit'rary comics (who get nervous at genre, and prefer to scurry to the socially respectable safety of mainstream fiction and memoir)** and proponents of superhero comics (who get nervous without enough tights and fight scenes); Gaiman gets pegged as overhyped by both sides. (The comparative weakness of his recent work for Marvel (1602, at least; I haven't read his Eternals series) hasn't helped.) Thus the introductions to the Sandman trades tend to be by people like Harlan Ellison, Samuel R. Delany and Gene Wolfe, rather than people primarily associated with the comics field. My guess is that you're more likely to hear Gaiman referred to as one of the great writers of recent times at an SF convention than a comics convention.***

But then, Sandman always appealed widely to those who read few other comics. I think it still does. (If I'm wrong about this, incidentally -- and I might well be -- so much the better.)

All of this is a roundabout and probably overly defensive way of saying that I, for one, think of Sandman as one of the great achievements in the graphic novel to date; it feels to me underrated, even by people who take comics very seriously; but I think it is a simply marvelous work.

So let's look at a page.

The page I want to talk about is from issue #19, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" -- one of the 'short stories' that Gaiman would periodically do in his comic, that is, stories that were complete in and of themselves in the issue, rather than part of a longer story arc. This one you can find collected in the third Sandman trade, Dream Country, or in the recently-released oversized hardback, Absolute Sandman, Volume 1. It tells the story of the first performance of William Shakespeare's play "A Midsummer Night's Dream" -- which, in Gaiman's tale, was commissioned by Dream of the Endless, an anthropomorphic personification of the realms of Dream and Story, and which (as part of the commission) was premiered before an audience of Faerie, including the Queen Titania, King Oberlin, Puck (AKA Robin Goodfellow) and the other characters portrayed in the play. (This issue, rather famously (or infamously?), won the World Fantasy Award, inspiring a rule-change to keep comics from winning what some people felt should be a prose-only award; rather like the twenty-second amendment's posthumous revenge on FDR for winning four terms, this particular ex post facto rule change only served to increase the distinction of the object of its spite.)

Page thirteen is from the middle of the story. The top two tiers of the page show a backstage conversation between Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, and Tommy (in a dress: he's playing Helena (this historically accurate, of course: women's roles were played by boys in English plays during Shakespeare's time)). The bottom tier shows two panels of the ongoing performance (lines by Puck and Bottom), and a comment from the real Puck in the audience. Here's what it looks like:

(Click for larger version.)

(That scan, by the way, is from my (comparatively old) copy of Dream Country. In addition to Gaiman & Vess, it was inked by Malcom Jones III, (correction from Neil Gaiman (!) in comments) colored by Steve Oliff and lettered by Todd Klein. The version in Absolute Sandman may have been recolored (although it's not clear that it was; from what Gaiman says here it sounds like only issues #1-18 were recolored), so might look different -- but, as with Absolute Watchmen, Absolute Sandman too pricey for some of us. So what you get here is a scan from the trade paperback. (If anyone out there with a copy of Absolute Sandman and a scanner wants to scan the page & send it to me, I'll post an update...))

One of the things Gaiman does marvelously well is have people tell brief, verbal stories: it happens throughout Sandman (and in his other work too), and it works well here. This page gives us Hamnet's story (and, yes, the name is real: in this case, as in so many others, Gaiman's "history is real history and his myth is real myth" (in the marvelously accurate words from Gene Wolfe's introduction to Fables and Reflections)). Hamnet feels pain at his father's preoccupation:

He's very distant, Tommy. He doesn't seem like he's really there any more. Not really. It's like he's somewhere else. Anything that happens he just makes stories out of it. I'm less real to him than any of the characters in his plays.

Mother says he's change din the last five years. But I don't remember him any other way. Judith -- she's my twin sister -- she once joked that if I died, he'd just write a play about it. "Hamnet."

Mother ordered him to have me for this summer. It's the first time I've seen him for more than a week at a time, that I remember. But we live five days' ride from London, up in Warwickshire, and see him seldom.

All that matters to him... all that matters is the stories.

A simple, powerful version of a familiar complaint (familiar in modern times, at any rate; I'm not sure how anachronistic it is to put it in the mouth and mind of a boy from four hundred years ago, although I have a nagging sense it might be somewhat). Which pleads the question: why is this little story so powerful?

It's all about the context. This story is an ordinary story, but it is juxtaposed to fantastic, extraordinary events. Shakespeare's company is presenting its play to an audience of faeries: an audience of otherworldly, bizarre, frightening beings who appeared through a magic door in the middle of a field. The dream play that they are crafting, it turns out, is about real creatures -- creatures far stranger and more menacing than their portrayal in Shakespeare's play. Yet in the midst of these eldritch events, Hamnet is still feeling -- still able to articulate -- the pain of his father's emotional distance. One common experience in genre literature is to put fantastic things against an ordinary backdrop to magnify their power; here Gaiman does just the reverse.

More context: on some level, we can't help but feel that Tommy's right. Hamnet's father is William Shakespeare -- that's William Fracking Shakespeare, who is not only the greatest writer in the English language but whose name has become, as often as not, a symbol for an abstract Unmatchable Genius as much as it is a symbol for the actual genius of his actual works. Proud of your Shakespearean father? How could you not be!? -- Which again highlights through the extraordinary the power of the ordinary: what boys want from a father is not Unmatchable Genius but love and attention and... well, a good and present father. Shakespeare is a genius; and geniuses pay attention to their work, not their sons.

Of course, this entire page (arguably much of the comic as a whole) is all about people not paying attention to what others are saying. Tommy says that Hamnet must be proud of his father. Although Hamnet seems to listen -- "proud? I guess" -- he then goes on to talk about a wholly different topic: his relationship with his father. He does not, in other words, answer Tommy's question. And then, at the end of Hamnet's story, Tommy returns the favor: he returns to his original theme ("I'd be proud of him, if he were my father") as if he hadn't heard what Hamnet was saying. And, of course, Hamnet's speech is itself all about his father's ignoring him (that, indeed, is the "people not paying attention" which is most likely to engage the average reader's attention). These multiple instances of non-connection, each playing off the other, are yet another context that give Hamnet's story its power (and save it from sentimentality): Hamnet no more pays attention to Tommy than Tommy does to him, or than either does to the actor playing Bottom who comes to get his mask in the midst of Hamnet's speech, or than any of them do to their weird (and wyrd) audience.

And then there's the fact that we see, three pages later, Shakespeare grieve for a death when Dream tells him that Kit Marlowe is dead. Dream says to Shakespeare that he did not realize that the news "would hurt you so"; Shakespeare replies:

You did not realize? No, your kind care not for human lives. Dark stranger, already I have regret our bargain. But come, our night's comedy begins once more.

Shakespeare does grieve, because he is not fully in the world of Story -- the world of Dream -- where pain is taken and made into things of beauty. He's enough in it that he can reverse his pain with the last sentence, and re-focus on the night's comedy; enough in it that he himself is partially one of Dream's kind, who cares not for human lives -- only for stories. But he isn't fully one. And so we suspect that he will, in fact, care deeply for Hamnet's death -- that Hamnet (and his sister Judith) are wrong.

We suspect: although we never quite fully know. There are more stories here than meet the eye, or the ear. (Often the most powerful stories are ones that are just hinted at, ones we are forced to imagine rather than hearing. And that's part of what we get here.) That Shakespeare's historical son, Hamnet Shakespeare, bore some relation to his play, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is not an original speculation on Gaiman's part. But he makes us imagine it as a story: the grief, and the grief filtered through the prism of a story to become great art -- to because enjoyment for audiences. Pain distilled to bitter to make a delicious dish. It is not only, as Puck calls it, a magic art, but it is a somewhat sinister one too, as Gaiman is at pains to point out.

This is a story all told off-panel. We don't see Hamnet's death; we don't see Shakespeare's grief or his use of it to write his most famous play. In the final issue of Sandman, when we see Shakespeare again (towards the end of his life), he mentions both his son and his use of experiences in his art -- but not together. Scott McCloud says that a man who dies between panels dies a thousand deaths, and indeed is killed differently by every reader; Hamnet Shakespeare dies, as it were, between panels, in the gutters: readers will tell themselves the story of his death, and it is all the more powerful for the forced necessity of our using our own personal invocation of Dream's art to do it.

Does Shakespeare care? Of course: we even see the pain, at the end of the run, when he asks Dream if Hamnet would have lived had they not made their bargain. He cares very deeply -- and uses that pain to write a play, arguably the best of his plays. It is that dichotomy that this page (and much of this comic) is about -- and that contrast that lends each side its power.

"But we live five days' ride from London, up in Warwickshire, and see him seldom." Those last four words -- "and see him seldom" are beautiful: spare, graceful, just archaic enough to fit the context but not so much so as to be obscure or ostentatious; making (as Marilyn Hacker once said) the reader add all the ugly parts of a sentence. Gaiman writes good prose: the prose on this page isn't straining to be poetic, but even there, there is quiet but unmistakable craft in it.

So far I have been discussing the top two tiers on this tree-tier page. Those tiers are backstage; the seventh and eighth panels return us to the stage: the dialogue here is Shakespeare's, from A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act III, Scene 1. Then, in the final panel, the real Puck -- the menacing Puck of Faerie, not the "merry wanderer of the night" of the play -- gives his judgment: "This is magnificent -- and it is true! It never happened; yet it is still true. What magic art is this?" The answer, of course, is that it is the magic art of story: "a lie that makes us realize the truth", as Picasso put it. But it is an art -- a magic -- that comes with a price beyond that of lying: a distance from life, from friends: a willingness to choose perfection of the work over that of life (quoting Yeats, this time). Here Gaiman and Vess show us -- on a single page -- what is gained (by quoting Shakespeare's actual poetry, showing the reaction of a naturally tough critic) and what is lost (by showing us Hamnet's pain).

One small skillful touch on this page is the use of the asses's head prop to tie to otherwise unconnected (or only thematically connected) parts together. Hamnet begins by cradling the prop, a physical articulation of his loneliness for his father's attention. Then, on the second tier, the actor playing Bottom interrupts the story (not hearing it, not even noticing that Hamnet is telling it: yet another example of people not listening to each other on this page packed full of it) to get the head and (in the background in panel five) puts it on. It's not even quite right to say that he interrupts: Hamnet pays no more attention to him than he to Hamnet, the story goes on with his costuming very much in the background, and the reader is likely to hardly notice the event, caught as we are in Hamnet's tale. But it means that when we switch back to the play -- the scene where Bottom awakes with an asses's head -- the on-stage action is subtly (possibly even unconsciously) but powerfully tied to the tale we just heard. It links all the events as part of a larger scene, links them in time, in space and in theme.

The artwork here is, as I said, not the focus of attention. But it is quite artfully done, presenting Gaiman's words in their best dress. Here is one small example of the skill: note that the panels on the bottom tier are a different shape (smaller & squatter) than the other six, with thicker gutters setting them off from each other and from the higher tiers. It's a small thing -- most readers won't consciously notice it at all -- but it helps differentiate the six panels presenting the part of the story behind the stage from the three panels that have shifted location to on (and in the audience of) the stage. Most likely without the reader's conscious attention, it helps clarify our sense of the movement of the story in an important, skillful way.

Vess's figures are extremely expressive too. Look at Hamnet's posture in panels one and five: the hunch in his back, the way he cradles the asses's head prop (in panel one) or buries his hands in his lap (panel five), all color his words. One of the reasons that Gaiman's simple story is so evocative is precisely these pictures: they lend an air of sadness (not unlike the workings of a good film score) that adds weight and tone to the tale. Hamnet's features, particularly in panels two and three, are individual and expressive. Vess's art is not as flashy as some of the art I've discussed previously in this series, but it is extraordinarily effective and graceful at what it does.

I want to return, however, to the issue of Story -- and I think it should be capitalized, for in the imagination of many fantasy writers (including, I think, Neil Gaiman) Story is an essential, a power almost as real and conscious as Dream in the world of Sandman. (In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (to which Gaiman contributed a few entries), John Clute writes about how awareness of the power of Story is essential to the nature of fantasy (as distinguished from the fantastic); see the entry for "story" and follow the cross-references.) I want to return to it because it ties in to my one criticism of this page (and of Gaiman and Vess's "Midsummer Night's Dream" more generally).

"Story" is a term with a certain resonance and meaning in Gaiman's work (and, judging from interviews and the like, his world more generally): story is, one might say, his term for the craft he practices so well, whether in comics or prose fiction or film or whatever-medium-it-is. Dream is, of course, Prince of Stories, and that identity is as central to his nature and narrative as are literal (REM-sleep-induced) dreams.

But was there ever a great writer of fictive narratives for whom the term seems less apt than Shakespeare? Oh, sure, one can define story to make it fit. But on a basic level Shakespeare seemed to care about everything involved in making a play except stories. His poetry and characters are unmatched, as original as any that have ever been crafted anywhere by anyone; his stories he borrowed from wherever. I find it difficult indeed to imagine thinking of Shakespeare's artistic process as all he cares about is the stories: that may fit a lot of writers -- may, perhaps, fit Neil Gaiman above all -- but Shakespeare? Surely all he cared about was the poetry; the language; the characters; the drama -- the play. If you want to say that poetry and language and characters and drama are story, well then fine. But at the very least it seems like an oddly chosen word in this context: more to the point, it seems like a case of slightly misplaced projection on Gaiman's part.

(I suppose it might be intended as a mistake of Hamnet's, misunderstanding his father even as his father ignores him -- or might anyway be read as such. But I see no sign of this in the text, and it seems to me the word's resonance in the Sandman series as a whole speaks against this.)

I doubt that this matters. In Sandman, historical accuracy is entwined with, well, dreams and stories: that Shakespeare was entranced with story makes a good one, even if it seems a bit odd based on the historical character we know of.

And in this one page, Gaiman gives us what might be a distillate of an entire thread of Sandman: the reality and fiction, the power and pain of Story. Here we see what story costs: Shakespeare is not there for his children; to Hamnet's death, his reaction (we can only assume) is precisely what his daughter Judith jokingly predicted: a play. But it's a great play, a great story: a story that crushes and distills the real to make a purer vintage than it can provide on its own. Puck -- even Puck, a "giggling-dangerous- totally-bloody- psychotic-menace- to-life-and-limb", as we have been told already in this issue, and as we will further see as the series progresses -- testifies to the power of the stories.

Stories are a magic art, an art that can make things more real than reality. In Puck's enjoyment, we see their power. In our enjoyment -- of Shakespeare's words (all the more powerful if we know and love the play, but powerful enough even without that), and of Gaiman's -- we see their power.

And, together, on this page, we see their cost. To make stories, an artist must suck his life dry. Magic is never free of consequences. This page powerfully pairs both the wonder and the pain that are the result.

Update: minor edits for clarity, and one factual correction.

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* Some people deny this: some people talk about how, if comics are too wordy, they can't be good comics, since comics are (definitionally) a visual medium. This is (I think) the sort of nonsense that drives Eddie Campbell to vanish from his own books in rage; and on this point I quite agree with him. The R. C. Harvey-ism of judging comics by an artificial (and deliberately simplistic) standard -- how well do art and words work together? -- is just silly. There's a place in comics for comics with brilliant dialogue and art which simply helps present it. (Because why ever not?) Good dialogue can tell a good story just as well as anything else; and there are brilliant novels and films which are -- roughly -- just talking heads, with little else. Why not comics?

** As a long-time fan of self-consciously literary SF, I had a bit of culture clash when I first began reading comics in a serious way again eight or nine years ago. I had thought that people who liked more literarily sophisticated SF and those who liked more literarily sophisticated comics would be natural allies in getting good narrative art that was shunned for silly reasons the attention that it deserved; but I think the dividing lines here are in fact -- counter-intuitively -- deeper than they appear. Oh, sure, SF fans will often read and like Gaiman and Moore. But they don't tend (in my experience) to explore the further reaches of the flowering medium of the graphic novel. And those who try to promote "comics as literature" (or art) tend to do so by distancing themselves from genre fiction (which in comics is dominated by superhero stories). I haven't seen it much remarked on -- I think few people are aware of it -- but there is an interesting culture clash here that I (as a fan of both forms) find frustrating.

*** Yes, of course I know that Delany and Ellison have both done work in comics; I've already discussed Delany's work in an earlier entry in this series, for Pete's sake. But they aren't primarily known as comics writers, but as SF writers (much as Ellison might hate the latter designation).

**** Assuming that the comics blogosphere is representative of the latter, since I haven't actually, y'know, been to any comics conventions.