My life in books

Jokes and the Unconscious, a collaborative graphic novel written by performance poet Daphne Gottlieb and graphic artist Diane DiMassa (of Hothead Paisan fame) is a brilliant, sometimes savage, sometimes heartbreaking story about coming to terms with death, sexuality, and living in a horribly imperfect world filled with pain, cruelty, callousness, lack of understanding and empathy, ironic co-incidence, and sometimes love and tenderness and just enough transcendence to make it possible to keep on living.

The narrative is framed within one summer in the life of the protagonist, Sasha, during which she works as a billing clerk in the hospital where her oncologist father, now on his deathbed, formerly practiced. However, the time frame shifts through Sasha's life, telling her story, her family's story, and the story of her father's illness and death in a mostly non-linear fashion. Along the way, it also addresses misogyny, date rape, child sexual abuse, domestic violence, patients's rights, ablism, Holocaust survivor issues, and a host of other issues, some of which may be triggering.

It's not an easy book, especially for those who may be dealing with loss of a parent or some of the other situations dealt with, but it's honest and it's worth reading and thinking about.

First, the confession. I'm not a huge fan of graphic novels. I read comics when I was a kid in the late 50s and early 60s, and since then, I've read and enjoyed a few graphic novels, from The Dark Knight and The Swamp Thing to Sandman and V for Vendetta to Persepolis and Fun Home. So I'm not what you might call a sophisticated reader of this kind of work.

But I know something about narrative, and something about art - and I know what I like. So here are my impressions of the five nominated works in the Best Graphic Story category.


Rat Queens, Volume 1: Sass and Sorcery
written by Kurtis J. Weibe, art by Roc Upchurch

Well, holy shit, this was a wild romp. A swordpunk D&D experience featuring four very weird and warped and wonderful women, doing what mercenary adventurers have been doing (at least in fantasy) for generations - getting drunk, stoned and laid, upsetting the mundanes, and being sent off on quests so everyone else can get some peace and quiet.

The characters are well-developed, the action is fast and furious, the artwork is well worth looking at closely, the dialogue is snappy and the plot has twists, turns, and lots of interesting sidestreets that one hopes will be explored in later volumes. I can see myself looking for those later volumes just to see more of these unlikely heroines.



Ms. Marvel, Volume 1: No Normal
written by G. Willow Wilson, illustrated by Adrian Alphona and Jake Wyatt

I came to this a complete Captain Marvel/Ms. Marvel virgin. Oh, I read a lot of comics back in the day - that day, for me, being the late 50s and early 60s - but while I read many of the D.C. Universe hero comics, i'd really only gotten into a few of the Marvel Universe heroes, like Spiderman and Fantastic Four.

So I knew nothing about Ms. Marvel before reading this fortunately, that did not get in the way of my enjoyment. The writing is good. I laughed out loud before even getting off the first page. The main character, Kamala Khan, is a teenager dealing with classic teenager issues like finding out who you are and where you fit in - but a young Muslim woman being raised in a traditional Pakistani family, she's living in between two worlds, facing racism and stereotyping outside the Muslim community, and patriarchal attitudes within her community. This aspect was handled very well, as was the process of learning to be a superhero after suddenly being granted special powers. I rarely read superhero comics any more, so I have no idea if the complexity of character shown in this work is common these days, but it certainly made reading this a pleasure.



Saga, Volume 3
written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Fiona Staples

Saga seems, ultimately, to be the story of Hazel, the narrator - although in the volume she is a newborn and hence not yet a major character. Her parents, Marko and Alana, are fugitives, being pursued by a dazzling variety of entities, including a robot prince with a television for a head, a bounty hunter and his companions - a truth-detecting cat and a recently rescued six-year-old slave girl - a vengeful ex-girlfriend, and two sweet gay journalists.

The reason Marko and Alana (and Hazel, and Marko's mother Klara, and a rather grisly young ghost girl Izabel) are on the run is because their people - the inhabitants of Landfall and those of one of its moons, Weave - been at war for generations and leaders on both sides fear that news of love for each other might cause a loss of morale.

The narrative follows all the parties - both the fugitives and their pursuers - and the situations they encounter. If this volume is characteristic of the series, every significant character has a backstory, and a development arc, and none of them are exactly heroes or villains, just people trying to make the best of the hands they've been dealt.

I enjoyed this, but somehow it just didn't grab me in a way that made me want to see what had gone before, or what is still to come. Maybe if the story was centred on those sweet gay journalists....



Sex Criminals Volume 1: One Weird Trick
written by Matt Fraction, art by Chip Zdarsky

While it's true that books and sex are two of my favourite things, the combination of the two in this graphic novel did not exactly send me soaring, if you know what I mean. It might have been the balance - way too much sex, not enough books - or it might have been the somewhat repetitive nature of the narrative.

The narrative begins with an adolescent girl named Suzie who discovers that when she has an orgasm, she is able to enter a jewel-toned euphoric state in which time is frozen, which she calls The Quiet. She ends up masturbating a lot, and when she gets older, having sex a lot. She becomes a librarian, but then her library is threatened when they don;t have enough money to pay the mortgage. At a fund-raising party, she meets a guy named Jon who can quote Lolita and brings him home - where she learns that he can enter the same state, only he calls it Cumworld. I prefer her name for it, maybe because I'm a woman.

Next we are treated to a great many pages in which Jon tells Suzie every detail of his sex life to date, interspersed with what seem to be flashforwards to the two of them stopping time and trying to rob a bank, but being foiled by another woman who can function in The Quiet. This is the overly repetitive part I was talking about.

Then, because they didn't see the flashforwards, they start planning to rob the bank Jon works at so the library will get the money needed to pay the mortgage - which is owed to the same bank. So it turns out that there's such a thing as the Sex Police who monitor the behaviour of people who can do what Suzie and Jon do, and this is how our protagonists become sex criminals. Interesting story, but it still needs more books.


The Zombie Nation Book #2: Reduce Reuse Reanimate
written by Carter Reid

Carter Reid did not submit his nominated work to the Hugo Voters Packet, and I had zero interest in spending twenty dollars on it when I'm not a huge fan of graphic narratives to begin with, so I was not able to evaluate the exact work he was nominated for. I did, however, spend a few hours paging through the strips archived on his website (zombienation.com) and found myself rather underwhelmed, particularly when I compare this to the other nominated works.

When I do read graphic narratives, my preference is for those that are, if not necessarily funny, satirical or insightful, at least telling a good, interesting story. Unfortunately, Zombie Nation appeared to offer none of these things to any significant degree. Some of the one-off strips were mildly amusing, but the story arcs didn't grab me and the artwork was uninspiring.

Funhome: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel

I found this to be a compelling example of memoir as graphic narrative. Of course, Bechdel is one of the best graphic novelists out there – the Dykes to Watch Out For volumes are an amazing blend of storytelling and political satire, as well as being a record of life in the US during a period of great social and political change from a lesbian perspective. Mark my word, future social historians are going to be citing the DTWOF all over the place.

But personal narrative is a different kind of storytelling, and much harder to do successfully, and Bechdel has done it brilliantly.

Funhome: A Family Tragicomic is an honest, poignant and often painful story of the artist as a baby dyke, in which the processes of growing up different, coming of age and coming out are paralleled against the slow revelation of a family secret – a father’s struggle with his own sexual difference – that ends tragically.

In reading Funhome, it is impossible not to think about the role that society’s demand for the appearance of “normalcy” and the suppression of difference, especially sexual difference, has played, and continues to play, in the personal and family lives of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered, two-spirited and otherwise queer people. Bechdel’s father pays an enormous price for attempting to compromise with society’s demands – as do all the other members of the family. Bechdel herself, a generation later, faces fewer barriers in coming out and in her story, contrasted with that of her father’s, we see the hope she has begun to emerge from the shadow of secret desires that surrounded and coloured her childhood.

I found it to be an intensely moving book. It’s interesting to me that while I am not a big fan of the graphic novel, two of the most interesting personal narratives I’ve read in recent years – this book and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis – have been graphic works by women who adopt a relatively simple style. Stripped to its essentials, the messages become even stronger.

Naturally, because the book is an honest examination of sexual themes in a young girl’s life, there have been howls of protest about it, particularly since it has been assigned in at least one university level English course. Visually, there are some panels that do contain sexual images. And of course it’s a book about growing up gay with a father whose repression of his own homosexuality leads to all sorts of unhappiness. To those who protest, I can only say, "grow up – and acknowledge that sex is a part of growing up while you’re at it." The panels in question are narrative, not erotic, and as such are less sexually charged than at least half of the billboard ads you’ll see walking down the street in any North American city. Frankly, I think this book should be required reading for every high school student in North America.

Chicken with Plums, by Marjane Satrapi

In her latest graphic novel, Satarpi, the author of Persepolis, the two-part personal memoir of a young Iranian girl growing up during the Revolution, and Embroideries, a look at family life and relationships though the eyes of the women of Satrapi’s family, turns her vision to the life – and death – of her great-uncle, musician Nasser Ali Khan.

Chicken with Plums is a meditation on the importance of art and love, set within the story of an artist who has lost and cannot replace the instrument that allowed him to express himself with passion, who carries within him an earlier loss of a love that gave him a passion to express. Without his instrument, Khan is overwhelmed with a sense of futility, has no desire to live any longer, and decides not to eat or drink again. Chicken with Plums is the story of what happens, among his family and friends, and in his own heart and mind, during the eight days it takes for him to die. Khan’s memories, fantasies and visions and the thoughts and actions of those around him, unravel the personal history of the artist that has led him to such a decision and illuminate the culture that has helped to shape his life and choices and the effect that the political and social changes in Iran over the first half of the 20th century have had on that culture.

Dark material, certainly, but at the same time full of life and celebration of the pleasures of life, and very powerful in its impact. It reminds us that, like the author's favourite family dish that serves as the book's title, there is no sweet without the sour, nor sour without the sweet.

The other day, I was watching the news - something not done lightly these days - and started thinking what the world would be like if, instead of all these various shades of skin pigmentation that have meant so much and been used to justify such callousness and hatred and bloodshed and injustice over the centuries, we were all the same shade of brown. A silly, rather superficial thought, because I know that the drive to identify a group as Other has much deeper roots than a difference in skin tone - that's the excuse, not the reason for hatred, xenophobia, slavery, and other delightful inventions of human society.

But my partner glaurung reminded me that this was, in fact, one of the shifts in reality that is forced to happen in Ursula K. LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven, so then I had to go find the book on our shelves and re-read it.

Rather co-incidentally, while I was re-reading it, we also watched V for Vendetta, and the juxtaposition of the two in my mind led me to greatly ponder the nature of terrorism and the desire to solve the (perceived) problems of the world.

In both cases, we have a situation where the current situation is clearly wrong. It deserves to be, needs to be, should be changed. But how? In The Lathe of Heaven, the problems are too big, too vast, too well-entrenched, for any ordinary mortal, or group of mortals, to change - LeGuin was writing of a world in which climate change had already done a great deal of harm, for example. And in V for Vendetta, the hold of a fascist police state combined with the power of a complicit media has made it very difficult for more than small, individual acts of resistance (the preserving of a Koran, for example) to be envisioned.

And into both worlds, there comes a person who has the desire to change the world for the better, and who acquires the means to do so.

In The Lathe of Heaven, George Orr, the man whose dreams can change everything - past, present and future, falls into the power of the mostly altruistic Dr. Huber, who only wants to make the world better - for himself, and for everybody - but operates without humility, without the wisdom to see that he cannot know what will be better and what will be worse, and what will be the effects of forcing such dramatic, repeated shifts in reality on the minds of people and the fabric of time and space. And in the process, he violates the person he is using to make all this happen. The Lathe of Heaven looks at two very key questions for the one who would change the world: does any one person have the right to decide what is best - or even better - for all, and do the means justify the ends?

V for Vendetta focuses more on the second question, although its answer to the first is implicit - perhaps, if the people join and consent, if they all become the revolution. V reminds me of Moses - a flawed leader, allowed to bring his people to the edge of the promised land, but not worthy to cross over with them, because of the weight of his mistakes. Or perhaps an active variant of the sacrificial lamb, the scapegoat, who takes upon himself to do the things that should not be done, but must be done, and accepts his exile from the new world his acts have created.

It is interesting that both works leave the second question - that of means and ends - open. Because that's always been the kicker.

In The Lathe of Heaven, we learn that the world would already have been destroyed had George Orr not changed the continuum as he lay dying from radiation poisoning some years before the opening events of the book. But the crisis brought on by Huber's use of Orr's gift would not have been survived without Orr's dreaming creation - or is it a creation? - of the Aliens who are gifted with the same abilities he is, but who have learned how to use them wisely, if at all, and, it seems, in some kind of communal state which at the very least allows for the possibility of consent among the changed.

In V for Vendetta, could the revolution have a chance of happening without the murders of those who build the fascist state in the first place? Would it have been more ethical if V had killed the leaders and creators out of pure revolutionary fervour rather than for revenge? Are the means justified if the one who does them takes the blame and the punishment, but leave a legacy for others to continue with cleaner hands?

I like reading - and watching - things that make me think, even if I'm not really sure of my answers either.