Comics for Comics' Sake

Generally speaking, I like webcomics. But what I like even more, paradoxically, are print collections of webcomics. I’m not sure I’ve ever read more than 5 pages of Girl Genius online, but I have all the collections so far. I enjoy them when they’re online, but they feel too ephemeral there. It’s not until I have a bound volume in my hand that I really feel like I’m looking at a comic, which is why when it comes to webcomics merchandising, I’ll take a book over a snarky t-shirt every time. (Far too few creators will indulge me on this, alas.)

Which brings us to Bite Me!, Dylan Meconis’ vampire farce of Revolutionary France. This was one of many books I picked up during APE 2009 (all of which I hope to get to eventually), but unlike many of those, this one’s reputation preceded it. I’d heard a lot of good things about Meconis, but I’d never gotten around to checking out her work, even though it was all freely available online. But now that I was right there at her table, and there was a bound volume, well then. I was powerless to resist.

Here’s what’s great about webcomics that you don’t often get with most American comics: they’re like a time-lapse photo of artistic development. In an original graphic novel, if the artist finds that his or her style develops over the course of working on the book, he or she can go back and patch up the first pages for consistency’s sake. But with a webcomic, of course, it’s being tossed up for public consumption as you go, so when the full story that originally took a year or more to create is put between two covers, it goes in warts and all.

For an example, here’s Meconis rendering Claire from near the start of each of the six chapters:

At the outset, the style is very flat and angular. There’s not much shading to be seen, and the facial poses tend to be either straight ahead or directly to the size, like an Egyptian frieze. But later, the poses get looser and more dynamic, the curve of the chin becomes an actual curve, and there’s more depths added to the facial structure with improved shading. (And this was where Meconis was by 2004. If you really want to be impressed, go have a look at where she is now.)

And now I feel a little bad, because I’ve taken all this space in an entry ostensibly about Bite Me! and all I’ve talked about is neat things you can see with a bound collection of any webcomic by an artist worth his or her salt. So back to the subject at hand.

The quality of the art having been firmly established by now, Bite Me! is something you want to read if you ever had a vampire phase and was later embarrassed by it. Meconis takes the Anne Rice trope of glamorous vampires in old France, but approaches it from the point of view that even after several centuries of unlife, the vampires wouldn’t be any more glamorous or seductive than ordinary people. Driving the stake home is Claire, an ordinary person who’s vampirized early on and takes naturally to the lifestyle. (And just to put the boot in further, there’s a late gag riffing directly off of Rice’s own characters.)

The format of the book is also worth a mention. Not the six-chapter format found online, which isn’t reproduced in the book. But… Well, ever since the trade paperback collection of superhero comics came into vogue, there’s been a debate about whether or not it’s acceptable to “write for the trade,” which is a way of saying writing stories that don’t have concrete stopping points in individual (purchaseable) issues, but instead simply cut off every 22 pages, because the assumption is that they’ll be eventually taken in as a complete 132-page story.

Like most webcomic authors who produce books, Meconis has her own variant of the “writing for the trade” problem to solve. She splits the difference neatly by organizing the story right from the start as a continuing plot that builds on itself with every page, but she also makes sure every page ends on a strong note–either a moment of melodrama or, more often since this is a farce, a punchline. Taken as a whole, you can still see the seams a bit. It’s not hard to remember the form in which the material originally appeared, where readers would be expecting a payoff with every update. Having a kicker at the end of every single page does play counter to expectations when reading a longform work, where you expect most things to build for a while before getting any payoff.

But if that’s true, it’s also true that Meconis ended up producing a work where something happens on every page, and you never (okay, almost never) get a page that’s just a big, self-indulgent splash panel because the artist thought it would look cool. The book is ultimately stronger rather than weaker due to the need to make sure every page works. In fact, there’s your review. Bite Me!: it works.

Harvey Pekar passed away a few weeks ago. But fortunately for us, he left half his life behind in ink.

There’s too much in this book to go into in detail, and what’s the point, really? Pekar obsessed about his work and its reception enough for any ten critics, and then duly recorded his neuroses about it in his comics. You can’t possibly think Pekar was more of an overlooked genius than Pekar did.

Suffice to say it’s still essential reading to show what’s possible with the medium. Though, in these books, what’s possible is not always what’s best: this volume, itself a collection of two collections, begins at the beginning, when Pekar was still essentially writing prose pieces that he could cajole friends into illustrating. The very first vignette, “The Harvey Pekar Name Story,” boasts R. Crumb art on a story that’s barely visual.

But as you keep reading–and you will, because even when he’s still grappling with the comic form, Pekar was a born storyteller–the script and the art start to complement each other better until you reach what I found to be one of the most striking single moments in the book.

“Guerilla Theatre: July ’74 – On the Corner,” illustrated by Greg Budgett and Gary Dumm, is an 18-page story that rambles and wanders, as all Pekar’s drawn-from-life stories do. The primary action concerns Pekar getting out of the house one evening and checking in with his friend the box office clerk, after which he meets up with two more friends in succession. The three of them leave the theater and eventually help one of the men move some furniture into his new apartment.

That takes up the last 17 pages of the story. The first page consists of Pekar watching the evening news, featuring reports on the Middle East and the House Judiciary Committee. And the reason I found this striking is because at no point during the next 17 pages–each one of which is basically an illustrated conversation–do either of these subjects come up again. Pekar neither thinks about them nor introduces them into the dialogue.

So why is this page in the comic?

After wondering about it, it seemed more like a quiet comment on the superficiality of the news. The topics Walter Cronkite discusses, despite their weightiness, have no bearing on the life of an average man in Cleveland, and he has no bearing on them.

It’s not that Pekar is ignorant or uncaring; there are plenty of stories in this volume that demonstrate his love for history and his awareness of world politics. But in the course of ordinary life, which is what Pekar primarily documents in his work, these things simply aren’t a factor. The evening news has transformed serious subjects into inconsequential trivia.

Now, maybe none of that was intended by Pekar, and maybe his actual reason for including the page was something entirely different. But that’s what you find yourself amazed by, again and again, in reading American Splendor. By presenting the ordinary reality without inflection, he makes us examine and draw new conclusions about things we’d other take for granted. That’s Pekar’s true gift to the world: the ability to see what would otherwise be invisible; the splendor present every day and everywhere.