Today, our newly regular (as in: from this point forward) contributor Sean Kleefeld of Kleefeld on Comics takes a look at one of the few nonfiction/journalistic comics to break out of the webcomics scene: Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. Is it worth owning on paper? Find out, after the break.

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Following up on this week’s feature review of Jessica Abel’s La Perdida:

Andrew Arnold of Time Magazine’s online comics column finds a particular strength where I saw a fatal flaw (and, no, I didn’t happen to read his review before writing my own):

Abel’s focus on relationships and Carla’s changing sense of self makes La Perdida one of the strongest and most challenging works of character study in the medium. Why challenging? Because Abel makes a gutsy move of creating characters that you can’t automatically like, and to whom you never warm up in the course of the story. Even Carla, the most sympathetic of the cast, seems naïve at best and stupidly unaware at worst. She keeps company with a spoiled snob, an arrogant blowhard and a fantasy-filled ne’r-do-well. Among its other themes, La Perdida examines how and why people form relationships with others that they don’t like very much because of how they fulfill other, sometimes self-destructive needs … read more.

The unlikeability of the protagonist comes up again (and is again excused) in the Chicago Sun-Times’ review, by Jessa Crispin (who also reviews Renee French’s The Ticking in the same round-up style article, another book that I’ve reviewed recently, myself):

La Perdida is deceptively complex. At first the book seems to be a simple coming-of-age tale, something along the lines of Abel’s shorter fiction. But as the story unravels, the politics become more nuanced and Carla, who in the beginning seems almost one-note in her naivete, becomes something difficult to pull off in fiction: the unlikable character you hope makes it safely to the end … read more.

I’m starting to wonder if I was maybe too harsh, or if, instead, Abel is being excused this flaw because of the fact that, in terms of ambition and technical achievement, and only those criteria, La Perdida dwarfs most of Abel’s contemporaries on the realistic/literary graphic novel scene. I suspect the latter, but am willing to be convinced of the former. I may have to reread the thing.

Meanwhile, veteran cartoonist Trina Robbins, ever the crusader for acknowledgement and celebration of womens’ roles in the history of comics (and rememberer of past slights), ends her glowing review at BookForum on a sharply ironic note:

The publication of La Perdida comes at an interesting time. Graphic novels such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis are alerting the reading public that women are producing important comics. Yet the current touring exhibit “Masters of American Comics,” organized by the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, argues for the significance of fifteen twentieth-century cartoonists — all of them men. In an Art News article on this dearth of women artists, Abel, who may or may not know her comics history, noted that “there were women comics artists, but they were not as important.” La Perdida may prove her wrong … read more.

A very long and worthwhile “author to author” interview from Beatrice.com, in which Abel interrogates Alison Bechdel (author of the “it” graphic-novel-of-the-moment, Fun Home, which I own, but haven’t yet had time to read and review), and vice versa, yields this tasty excerpt about craft, and how craft relates to theme (normally I wouldn’t pull such a long excerpt, but the interview itself is so much longer that I feel okay doing this):

Jessica Abel: I realized at some point in the 90s that the vast majority of my comics had to do with people trying to communicate with one another, trying to know themselves, but usually failing. I think it may come out of an earlier interest in authenticity: That is, wanting to be a punk rocker, but since I was born late (my prime teen years were 1984-1987, six sad years too late to have BEEN THERE!) I always felt like a poseur. This kind of rule-making seems to me a crucial method people (young people especially) draw lines for themselves—I knew that band when, I grew up in the projects, I was in the movement before there was a movement—it’s so destructive, yet so appealing. This is what Carla’s struggling for, and it’s by definition impossible. Her realization of that is what enrages her about Harry’s lack on interest in the same standards, and what makes her feel superior to him. Acknowledging that these standards of authenticity are valid, and defending them is the next best thing to fitting the standards.

So, going back, in my earlier short stories, I was deeply interested in getting it right: the right slang, the right details in places, and most especially, the right body and facial expressions. I wanted to convey all that unspoken code that revealed both the characters’ true thoughts and how they showed and hid them, and, probably a little sadly, my authentic and deep knowledge of the kind of people and scene I was writing about. The drawing style I used was very tight, very picky. I wanted to draw every detail. When I collected the stories, I came up with the title “Mirror, Window” as a way of referring to just these ideas of seeing—seeing oneself, seeing others; seeing truly, or only a pale or distorted reflection.

Meanwhile, my drawing style was growing increasingly frustrating to me. In my effort to get everything exactly right, I was driving myself bananas. Among other things, I realized that, when you draw in such a tight, controlled style, you open yourself up to criticism (in my case, my own) that things aren’t quite right. When a room is drawn so carefully, when a detail is wrong or missing, your imagination doesn’t add it in. Readers are restricted to seeing the elements that are right there in front of them. Then, of course, there’s the time issue. Those pages took me forever, and gave me major hand/arm pain.

So when I was living in Mexico, and started questioning the subject matter of my previous work, I started reassessing my drawing style as well, and plunged into a period of doing exercises and research to develop a new way to draw. I had Matt give me assignments, like redrawing an existing page of comics at print size, at 50% of print size, and at 200% of print size, then photocopying all to the same size and comparing them to see how comfortable you feel drawing at different scales. Or redrawing a relatively complex existing panel in progressively simpler styles

The result was a style that implies more than it shows, and so, ironically, feels more “true” to the scene I want to draw than a style that is more specific. It seems to me that the reader’s imagination is able to fill in the gaps more effectively than I ever could. Plus it’s a lot faster and more fun to do. Of course, I preserved my interest in facial and body gesture in this style as well, it’s just a bit more fluid … read more

Note: I’ve only linked to the first page of the above-excerpted interview (the excerpt itself occurs on page 3) — be sure to find and click the “part 2,” “part 3,” etc., links, which are near the top, middle part of the page — it’s kind of confusing. The whole interview is definitely worth reading.

Title: La Perdida Author: Jessica Abel Publisher: Pantheon

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Jessica Abel’s La Perdida takes the “novel” part of “graphic novel” more seriously than most. It feels hefty, meaningful, novelistic, and not just because of its actual pagecount. As a high-stakes coming-of-age story set among young, politically idealistic but ethically challenged expatriates, it reminds me of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories (albeit with more cocaine and less cabaret). Granted, Isherwood’s Communist (and fellow-travelling) characters lived closer to the bone: their wished-for, gabbed-about, imaginary revolution felt more real — because it was actually starting to happen in other nearby countries, maybe, and because Germany, the setting for Isherwood’s book, was in the process of turning itself into Hitler’s Third Reich at that very historical moment, in part due to middle-class panic induced by the rise of chattering, well-off expatriate intellectuals purporting to be the vangard of a Soviet-style revolution while gobbling canapes and guzzling fancy cocktails. As in Isherwood’s turn-of-the-century Germany, the politics in La Perdida’s turn-of-the-millennium Mexico come across as dangerous, deceiving poses. For example, Abel’s self-professed Communist agitator, a balding lounge lizard named Memo, uses his presumed moral superiority as a weapon against (primarily) women: self-righteous political outrage as pick-up line. When he does act upon his “convictions,” it is in a deeply nasty, pathetically opportunistic way. That he is able to justify a simple grab for money with high-sounding rhetoric is entirely believable, and handled very well, and very subtly, by Abel, making him more interesting than he might have been in any other graphic novel, but, all the same, we feel nothing but contempt for him. He is abhorrent. We never understand what the other characters see in him — and we never understand what he sees in the other characters, either, by the way. There’s not a winner in the bunch.

And there’s the rub. It is difficult to sympathize with any character in this book. They’re all thoroughly unlikeable, and not even in a smart-ass, “love to hate’em” kind of way (as in, say, the novels of Will Self or Martin Amis). They just come across as pathetic, self-deluded, and self-absorbed — the narrator/protagonist not least of all. That was my biggest obstacle while reading La Perdida — which, admittedly, is a fine achievement, a major work, a technical tour de force, with beautifully rendered illustrations, realistically-staged, morally difficult situations, a meaning that matters, and so on, and so on, and so on. I hated every well-written, painstakingly defined, superbly acted, eminently believable character, as though they were real shitheels whom I’d simply rather not know. I wanted to shake them. I didn’t want to spend my time with them — not even in my imagination. I dunno. I might be overstating this. Maybe it’s just because I’m getting old, and don’t have a lot of patience with grandstanding adult children anymore (which is why I’m glad I never became a college professor, by the way).

Or maybe (more likely) it’s an actual structural problem with the book itself. First-person narratives (and, thanks to a framing story, plus narrative captions scattered throughout the book, we are encouraged to think of this as a first-person story, a very detailed flashback, essentially, which starts on page eleven, and lasts for more than two hundred pages) don’t all come in the same size and shape, or with the same intention. Any fiction, actually, but especially first-person fiction, depends on the artificial device of a narrator, whose distance from (or closeness to) the action can color the reader’s experience, and create (or destroy) potential meaning. For example, a story told today by an ninety-five-year-old woman about something that happened to her when she was fifteen will be very different from a story told eighty years ago by a fifteen-year-old girl about something that happened to her earlier that same day — even if the same events occur in both stories. Similarly, the tone of story (and hence its meaning) will be affected by the narrator’s imagined audience, and her intent in telling the story: is the narrator telling the story to, say, her priest for absolution, or to her ex-husband, as an excuse, or to her daughter, by way of preparing her for some important moment in her life, or (as is the case in La Perdida) to herself, to wallow in her own self-disgust and regret over mistakes she has made in the recent past? Usually, these kinds of frames and meta-frames are left invisible — in the same way that a method actor’s preparations for a role (the biography she writes for her character, the traumatic scenes she imagines for her character’s past, and so on) are not provided explicitly to the audience, but are simply allowed to color and inform the performance for good or for ill, the novelistic narrator’s distance and intent in telling a story cannot always be understood directly. Most of the time, they can only be inferred.

The narrator of La Perdida has not forgiven herself for the mistakes she made during her short stay in Mexico — so her telling of the story focuses with brutal precision on every self-deception, every example of poor decision-making, and every unkind motivation, every flaw in her own and her friends’ moral complexions. We are never given a chance to live vicariously through Carla’s mistakes, by accepting them as inevitable, and thereby imagining that we understand them, and her. Tales of youthful folly and redemption work best when the reader goes along with the protagonist’s moves, taking them as supremely logical and self-evident, until the metaphorical boom is lowered. In other words, if we are made to feel like we would have made the same mistakes, given the same set of circumstances, we have a greater stake in the outcome of the story. That’s not the case here. From the very beginning of this book, when Carla decides to move to Mexico and take advantage of her ex-boyfriend, a lazy Trust Fund kid who wants to be the next Kerouac, we can’t help but disapprove of her choices (in part because the narrator refuses to slide over them or give them any kind of winking approval). Or, at least, I couldn’t. That makes it very hard to be surprised — or even to care — when the inevitable bad climax occurs. You just get the feeling that the narrator got exactly what she deserved (and what she got, I have to tell you, was pretty damn harsh). Maybe if Carla-as-narrator had had a few more years to ruminate, and forgive herself for what she did, before telling us her story, she could have brought a little humanity and humor into the mix, to alleviate the uncomfortable, wallowing angst that she delivers to us in the book as-it-is. The same story could have been told in a way that made us understand Carla’s motivations (Memo’s strange attractiveness, as a friend, and a womanizer, for example, could have maybe been developed and made real, shown to us in action, instead of merely pointed-at and taken for granted — but that would have required a narrator with more distance, and more experience of the world, maybe, a calmer and more mature outlook, than our narrator, Carla, as she exists at the beginning of the book).

My creative writing teacher used to tell me that there were several levels of mistake-making, when it came to writing novels. The first level, epidemic in undergraduate (and, for that matter, graduate) writing classes, is strictly technical: your sentences are clunky; your scenes aren’t set; your plot doesn’t make sense, and so on. That’s the level of mistake-making that keeps you from being a professional writer. After you’ve gone past that level, and have become a professional writer, there’s the next level: your characters don’t come alive as brightly as they might; your themes contradict themselves in ways you didn’t intend; there’s too much of your favorite writers showing up in your work. That’s the kind of mistake-making that keeps you from being a prominent contemporary. At some point, you get to the final level of mistake-making: the kind of mistake-making that keeps you from being a Great Figure for the Ages, like, say, Virginia Woolf or Thomas Hardy or whatever. It seems to me that the mistake Abel makes in La Perdida (the narrator’s lack of sympathy and affection for herself and her friends — maybe Jessica Abel’s own lack of sympathy and affection for her characters? — causes the reader to regard them coldly, too) is at that level. Everything else is impeccable here. Few other graphic novelists — even among the most famous — have even advanced beyond the first level of mistake-making. Most of them can only draw pretty (or distracting, at any rate) pictures.

But, yeah, there it is: in my opinion, this book is on the verge of greatness, but fatally and deeply flawed all the same. I expect that maybe if I’d read it when I was twenty years younger, in the throes of my own selfish, idealistic, post-collegiate period of self-deception, I might have liked it a lot more. Make of that whatever you will.

Title: La Perdida Author: Jessica Abel Publisher: Pantheon

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