Non-fictional comics are unusual animals: setting out, like any non-fictional book, to tell you about a subject in a largely objective manner, the fact that they’ve got the subtle tools of the comic medium to work with entails that they’ve got quite a bit of flexibility in terms of what flavour of objectivity they want to portray. This doesn’t necessarily entail that non-fictional graphic novels are less reputable or reliable than their text-only cousins, but that they have more and different means by which to engage the reader’s interest and reinforce his or her learning. (It’s no accident that they’ve been accumulating on the shelves of high school libraries lately.)
And so, in this monthly column, Multiversity will be “keeping it real” by checking out works that straddle the line between comic art and non-fiction — some of these comics doing it so well that you wonder why there needs to be a line at all.
This week I had the unusual experience of reading through “The Beats: A Graphic History”, an anthology of short biographical essays concerning the major and minor figures that made up that tumultuous countercultural movement. A good chunk of these essays are written and illustrated by “American Splendor” collaborators Harvey Pekar and Ed Piskor, although there’s also work by a panoply of other artists and writers, from Mad magazine cartoonist Peter Kuper to underground comix pioneer Trina Robbins. Detailing the lives of major figures like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as well as lesser-known writers like Philip Whalen and Diane di Prima, this collection is both diverse and satisfying, adding up to something greater than the sum of its parts and presenting a vivid and off-kilter look at Beat culture.
The essay that opens the volume is a doozy: relating the gobsmacking life story of Jack Kerouac (which encompassed menial jobs, heaps of drugs, trips cross-country and prison time), this Pekar/Piskor effort pulls no punches. While it comes clear that this Kerouac fellow was not a nice guy, his work is nicely contextualized and evaluated, allowed to stand a little to the side of the nitty-gritty real life events as a touch of literary criticism tinges the biographical details.
This opening essay establishes a method of getting information across that stays consistent throughout the book: the hard history is delivered by means of long captions, while the flavour and vigour comes through in the accompanying art. The speech bubbles, meanwhile, are mostly summations of what is generally understood to have been a subject’s attitude about a particular situation, and for the most part are not direct quotations from letters or interviews. (In one panel a bummed-out Kerouac slumps over an ashtray while his thought-bubble fumes “This is my best stuff and those idiots won’t touch it. What idiots!! I’m the James Joyce of my generation.”)
However — and as in this excerpt from ‘William S. Burroughs’, below — the long narrative captions occasionally take over, making the pages read more like a heavily illustrated conventional history than a comic. In this case, however, Piskor’s art more than picks up the slack, getting a lot of mileage out of a sensitive portrayal of the poet as well as letting the sheer, sad ridiculousness of some of the biographical details shine through.
Still, if this book has one major flaw, it’s that the captions are often made to carry too much weight. Bearing in mind that the work of the Beats often aimed to challenge words and their accepted meanings, a stronger emphasis and more enthusiastic use of non-literary elements would have fitted the material better. It may also have made the material easier to absorb: with all that writing crammed onto each page, this history can feel like an onslaught of information.
The subjects that stick most firmly in the memory, actually, are those set out in short form by the anthology’s disparate contributors. Distinct from one another in art style while maintaining a similar voice (many of them are scripted by Pekar), they’re more succinct than the entries on Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, and do a better job of transmitting the overall texture of the subject they explore.
Continued belowA standout essay among these concerns Kenneth Patchen, a San Francisco-area Beat known for his “picture poems” and other experimental work. Written by Harvey Pekar and Nick Thorkelson, and drawn by the latter, this entry adopts a narrative voice where the other essays are more scholarly, and also stands out by incorporating generous excerpts from Patchen’s written work into the panels. It’s a breath of fresh air in a book that occasionally seems more interested in sordid details than the actual poetry that these men and women produced, with Thorkelson’s playful art neatly getting across the jazzy spirit of Patchen’s writing. Another bonus is that this chapter lists its sources at the end, helping the interested reader to further material detailing the life and work of Kenneth Patchen.
The main strength of this anthology is its broad scope: it covers the visual artists (Jackson Pollock, Jay Defeo) of the Beat period and sketches out the influence of jazz musicians like Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, while making room for a chapter on the City Lights Bookstore that stood at the forefront of the Beat scene in San Francisco. There’s even a chapter on “beatnik chicks” and the prejudices they faced, scripted by Joyce Brabner and set out in tight chiaroscuro panels by Summer McClinton.
There’s just so much variety here, in terms of material covered as well as the different art styles, while Pekar’s prevailing voice lends the whole unity and stability. It could all stand to be informed a little more strongly by its own subjects, and have more fun with the versatile medium that is the non-fictional comic book, but all told, if you’ve ever been intrigued by a movement that pushed obscenity laws and established new precedents for the experimental capabilities of poetry, you’ll find something to enjoy — and learn from — in “The Beats”.
