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Detail from De:Tales
© 2006 Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba |
The authors of De: Tales: Stories of Urban Brazil
, fraternal twins Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba, take themselves — their daydreams, their art, their sexuality, their drunken enthusiasms, their more sober hopes and wishes, and even (or maybe especially) their twinship — very seriously, in the same way that, say, a fourteen-year-old girl takes herself very seriously. This is not meant as an insult. I grant that it is an odd thing to say, especially given the explicitly macho content of many of the short stories contained in this collection, their first book to enjoy widespread US distribution. The boys, it seems, are always on the prowl for female companionship, usually in bars, usually while drunk. But unlike homegrown comics in the same genre (the webcomic Butternut Squash, for example), the process of attracting and securing a one-night-stand isn’t played as a cynical frat boy joke. Here, any random encounter at a singles bar can become an opportunity for existential crisis.
In the book’s most emblematic story, “Reflections,” which is presented back-to-back in two different versions — one drawn by Fabio, with his smooth flowing brushwork, another by Gabriel, whose sharp, clean-line pen stylings remind me of 100 Bullets illustrator Eduardo Risso’s best — one of the twins (or maybe each of the twins, separately, at different times), afraid to talk to a girl across the bar who has been watching him, flirting with him, ducks into the restroom to take a piss, where he meets a couple of different future versions of himself: a mopey one who never worked up the nerve to talk to the girl, and a happy one who did. And they talk about the main character’s quandary. A lot. “There you are,” says the happy, about-to-get laid version of himself, “thinking about your encounter, freaked out … can’t even take a leak … and the girl outside is gonna get tired of waiting … and she’s gonna find another loser. I didn’t freak, but went right back … it’s already happening. It’s in your eyes. There’s no other way.” By the end, it becomes clear that the protagonist, himself, will become/has become the mopey version seen previously, the one who never went back outside to talk to the girl. This is treated as high tragedy. In these stories, the struggle to get laid for the night, any night, is as deeply convoluted, as momentous and perilous, as the adventures of any contemporary grim’n'gritty superhero. Again, that is not meant as an insult. Moon and Ba redeem their penchant for melodrama, their self-absorption, and their, let’s face it, celebration of a fairly careless and promiscuous lifestyle, with some valuable coin indeed: sincerity. Even when one of their protagonists, in the story “All You Need is Love,” ducks out on a one-night-stand with a lie and an excuse the morning after, consciously hoping that he will never see this woman again, he still has his head in the clouds: “And the boy-nothing left the girl-nothing with whom he’d had sex-nothing the previous night and spent the rest of the day thinking about love-everything.” It’s difficult to read that unironically — but I’m fairly certain that that is how it’s meant.
To be fair, it’s not all about drinking, carousing, and one-night-stands. One of my favorite stories, “Happy Birthday, My Friend!” is about how the boys resurrect a dead friend of theirs (by peeing in a circle on the floor of their studio with some of their other friends, while thinking of him) for one last night of — well, okay, drinking and carousing. Once again, there’s a charming sweetness here, a lack of guile, that would not stand up to any sort of ironic reading.
Moon and Ba demonstrate a tremendous amount of artistic skill and storytelling talent. I hope that their next works might, maybe, be a little less self-indulgent. Ba is working on the latest Matt Fraction project, Casanova — and I think that’s probably where both of these guys will find their biggest success: illustrating the work of other writers with less personal stories to tell. Maybe that’s an evil thing for me to say. One shouldn’t discourage personality, or even selfishness, in artists, surely? I dunno. Their writing isn’t incompetent — it’s just too, well, twee, in a strange, “macho dude who gets too huggy with his man-pals when he’s drunk, and he’s drunk a lot” kind of way.
Ultimately, whether you will enjoy this book or not depends a lot on your own tolerance for and/or appreciation of, people who wear their hearts on their sleeves. You might find it charming. But it could just as easily be grating to the nerves (I can imagine hating it utterly, if I hadn’t been in exactly the right mood — on vacation, hanging at the beach, very relaxed, mostly drunk myself — when I read it). It’s good for what it is, I guess, but it’s definitely not the kind of book that I would press into the hands of my best friends, demanding that they read. And that’s what it seems to want, very much, to be.
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