We’re back with our weekly Small Press Spotlight series, with this week’s title not necessarily fitting the word “Small Press” as well as some in the past have, but fitting into the niche of what I’m trying to do with this post (which is share smaller, non-superhero books with our audience).
This week’s book is James Sturm’s Market Day, a title that comes from one of the true greats in the industry and from perhaps the most prestige of “small press” publishers in the industry – Drawn and Quarterly. Very well known for his work on his America trilogy and at the Center for Cartoon Studies (which he co-founded and is still involved in, as I found out through Lucy Knisley’s French Milk of all places), Sturm is an elegant craftsman who puts as much care and thought into his panels as his protagonist Mendleman does into the rugs he sells in this book.
This is an exceptional book. Find out why after the jump.
James Sturm, regardless of how Market Day turned out, already is on my list for favorite cartoonists of this year if only because of his awesome run of articles for Slate in which he shared that he was going to quit the internet (besides his recent venture online to console his daughter) and how exactly that process was going for him. They are awesome, and exemplify why the guy is just so damn talented both from a written and illustrated standpoint.
His recent release Market Day from D&Q does so even better, leaving his fortress of storytelling solitude in America and taking us to an unknown area of Eastern Europe. There, he introduces us to Mendleman, the lead of this tale. Mendleman is a man with much weight on his shoulders, a man with a fierce creative spirit but all of the worries in the world. His wife Rachel is 8 months pregnant with their first child and he desperately needs to sell some rugs at the nearby market to provide for his family. It seems he is an artist, not unlike Sturm, who takes great care in his craft. Someone who notices the difference between 12 thread and 16 thread endings in a rug. Someone who takes his keen eye for observation to craft new and exotic rugs, taking simple things like a nearby sunrise and storing it for a compelling and fresh rug.
But he is also a man who is transitioning from being a husband to being a father. The weight he feels from his life is ever present from page to page, almost acting as the second lead. The pressure of being a man who takes pride in his craft…the pressure of pending fatherhood…the pressure of leaving his wife and soon-to-be-born child to provide for them…the pressure of being a discerning artist in a world filled with people just looking to make a dollar for their minimal quality goods. Mendleman feels like a real world representation of Sturm, a man who looks to reality to create something beautiful but sees his work routinely outsold by trite variations on simplistic formulas. As a character and on his journey we are given ample view into a story whose themes are universal throughout time, and it is remarkably well crafted.
Some may question the ending and its very open nature, and the complete lack of resolution that is given to us. While it is a bit trying at first, when you start to think about it a bit more you realize it makes perfect sense. For a story about a man who is surrounded by uncertainty (and turns to the one certainity in his life – his loom – for comfort), to conclude in such an uncertain place isn’t lazy or frustrating…it is completely and utterly fitting.
Sturm as a cartoonist is one who can achieve a lot of power with minimal linework and sparse landscapes. He’s not someone who is going to overload the page with detail, he just wants to give us the reader the full story with as economically as he can. Pages pack a lot of power in their often limited detail, choosing subtlety as his defining tool. A morose hunch, a soft gesture, a worn out face…these are the things that Sturm uses so powerfully within this book.
Market Day is another phenomenal success from James Sturm. Granted, it is about as high profile a release as you can get from a small press publisher, I just wanted to make sure that this is not a book that ends up going ignored because it doesn’t feature Wolverine or Deadpool nor is it celebrating its 600th issue. It is an emotional and true book, giving readers a tour of the life of a man who wears the weight of the world on his shoulders, but keeps going no matter what.
