Ten Graphic Novels for People Who Don't Read Comics

There are dozens of others that could fit this list. Note that I avoid super-heroes and their fellow travelers science fiction, fantasy, and horror in this list because all these things put some people off.

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Louis Riel by Chester Brown

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Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse

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Kings in Disguise by James Vance and Dan Burr

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Maus by art spiegelman

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American Splendor by Harvey Pekar and many artists

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The Book of Genesis by God and Robert Crumb

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Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez

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Can't Get No by Rick Veitch

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From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

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Signal to Noise by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

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Comics in 2005

The Best American Comics 2006 (2006; stories originally published 2004-2005): edited by Harvey Pekar and Anne Elizabeth Moore, containing comics written and/or illustrated by Jesse Reklaw, Justin Hall, Rebecca Dart, David Heatley, Chris Ware, Kim Deitch, Anders Nilsen, Ben Katchor, Joe Sacco, Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert Shelton, Alison Bechdel, Alex Robinson, Jessica Abel, Rick Geary, Kurt Wolfgang, Lynda Barry, Robert Crumb, Seth Tobocman, Esther Pearl Watson,  Lilli Carré, and others.

This first volume of Best American Comics, from the same publisher who gave you long-running anthologies that include Best American Sports Writing and Best American Mystery Writing, seems to be a mainstay of used bookstores as a result of it being remaindered out the wazoo soon after its publication back in 2006. Anne Elizabeth Moore did the initial selection and the late Harvey Pekar made the final selection from her list, in case you're wondering what the two editors did.

Pekar's preference for reality-based storytelling explains the book's avoidance of superhero and similar genre material. There is one funny parody of super-heroes. That's it. Some of the comics work as absurdism or satiric fantasy. But the bulk of the volume consists of memoir and memoir-like work, with some experimental pieces that play with form and structure and lay-out interspersed throughout.

There's a lot of awfully good long-form material here. I'd pick Jesse Reklaw's story about childhood pets, "13 Cats," as one of the two or three best stories here. It's sad and funny. And it doesn't wear out its welcome. An autobiographical piece by American giant Robert Crumb also pleases me to no end (as does Crumb's snarky reply to the editors' earnest request for a text piece on the origins of the story). 

Justin Hall's "La Rubia Loca," the longest work included herein, could use some trimming, and perhaps some serious work on working with more panels per page. The length makes it feel padded. The pat ending in which a character learns to love life from the lessons learned from the torments of a mentally ill woman... ugh. Cut out those last few pages, though, and it's a nicely observed work, though the art bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Gilbert Hernandez. There are also fine pieces by Kim Deitch, Joe Sacco, and Lynda Barry, among others.

There are two major flaws with the volume. One comes with its page size, that of a normal hardcover. This reduces several stories originally printed in larger formats to near-incomprehensibility. Pieces by Chris Ware, Rebecca Dart, and David Heatley suffer the most from the size reduction -- you'll either need a magnifying glass or you'll say to hell with it.

The second comes with the decision to include excerpts from longer works. An excerpt from a Jessica Abel piece is probably the worst of these. It's the comics equivalent of treading water for 20 pages, and puts me in mind of how annoyed I get at short-fiction anthologies that include excerpts from novels. I understand it in the context of a Norton literary-survey anthology. In a 'Best of' anthology of shorts, though, it seems like an editorial violation of some fundamental rule. It's as if the Best Short Oscar category included 20-minute chunks from the Best Picture category along with the 'real' shorts. I hate it. I really hate it. 

Still, a worthy beginning to a series that offers non-superhero comics material to a mainstream book-buying audience. Recommended.

Robert Crumb and Jack Jackson: Horror Comix, Funny Comix

God's Bosom and Other Stories: The Historical Strips of Jack Jackson: written and illustrated by Jack Jackson (1967-1992; collected 1995): The late and much lamented Jack Jackson was a Texas cartoonist of terrific ability with an unusual-for-comics interest in history. Much of his best work from the 1960's onwards, including several novel-length comics works, examines the history of Texas and some of its most famous and infamous characters.

God's Bosom collects the eponymous piece and more than a dozen other pieces devoted to history. These include cartoon op-eds on then-current Texas problems, comic strips about why Texans hate Yankees, and brief histories of Zap Comix and Apex Novelty Press. The bulk of the volume comprises lengthier historical pieces that range from G-rated histories of famous Texas highways and the Colt revolver to graphic treatments of both fictional and factual horrors of the past.

The two masterpieces of the collection are "God's Bosom" and "Nits Make Lice." The first is a partially fictionalized retelling of a Spanish shipwreck in the New World in the early 16th century. The survivors undergo a harrowing quest for safety that goes almost as badly as such a quest can go. It's a graphic, stomach-turning tale of survival and death. "Nits Make Lice" is, if anything, even more graphic and disturbing. It tells of the massacre of a band of Cheyenne in pre-statehood Colorado by the U.S. military in the late 19th century. It's as tragic and awful as it sounds in its indictment of America's genocidal foundation. The other pieces don't come up to these levels, but very few short works in comics do. 

Throughout the collection, Jackson's art -- mostly realistic, but with a clever gift for caricature and 'cartoonyness' when appropriate -- shines. It's beautiful stuff even when it depicts the horrible, with a sure command of line and an attention to telling detail. Jackson was a master with an unflinching eye. One can't unsee some of the things he depicts here. Highly recommended.

Complete Crumb Comics Volume 5: written and illustrated by Robert Crumb (1968/Collected 1990): It took four volumes for Fantagraphics to get to the public beginning of Robert Crumb's career in cartooning. Volume 5 of the Complete Crumb Comics offers a grab-bag of Crumb's late 1960's "Hippy Comix," with such familiar characters as Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat making early appearances. And the infamous Angelfood McSpade. Can't forget her. And the cover to that Big Brother and the Holding Company album.

This is a series for completists, after all. It's all fascinating stuff, and while much of it really is for completists only, Crumb is such a towering talent in the history of cartooning that even his throwaway material is worth pondering. Some of the material here is graphic and disturbing, and Crumb's problematic 1960's and early 1970's use of violence (sexual and non-sexual) towards women is on full display. Never has one cartoonist so unapologetically, exhaustively and fearlessly exposed the contents of his own Id, to such great and disturbing artistic effect. Highly recommended.

Farewell to Cleveland

Harvey Pekar's Cleveland: written by Harvey Pekar; illustrated by Joseph Remnant (2012): Harvey Pekar, who died in 2010, was one of a handful of the finest comics writers ever produced by the United States. His essential topic was his life and its interaction with the people, places, and ideas he came into contact with. He could be hilarious ("A Good Shit is Best" perhaps being the epitomal version of Pekar's deft hand at dialogue and the rhythms of story). But his role, in comics and in culture as a whole, often seemed to be as the champion and the chronicler of the mundane and the human.

This posthumous graphic novel, beautifully rendered by young artist Joseph Remmant (seriously, he looks like he's all of 12 in the back-jacket photo and boy, can he draw), takes us through a brief history of Cleveland, Ohio that also touches upon Harvey's life and times. It's poignant because of what it is (probably Pekar's last new work). It's poignant because of what it shows (the rise and fall of an American city).

Remnant's art uses a lot of photo references for the historical stretches of the narrative. Nonetheless, while exquisitely detailed, the art is also warm, with a nice sense of the cartoony when it comes to human beings. Robert Crumb was one of Pekar's long-time collaborators, and there's certainly some of Crumb in the approach to the human form. We're just a couple of ticks off representational.

Pekar's life and work were remarkable. The point of that work -- of the friends and lovers and casual acquaintances and historical moments and jazz legends and everything else showcased in that work -- was that the remarkable is all around people, not in some magical fantastic way, but in the various things ordinary humans say and do.

The observational moments worked organically with those in which Harvey railed against the anti-human policies of politicians and businessmen, and with those in which Pekar stood pretty much appalled at the breadth and heft and utter emptiness of popular American culture. But he could still laugh about it, and he could still reminisce fondly about the Cleveland Indians of 1948, who actually won a World Series.

Pekar's work helped create a sub-genre of comics -- the confessional auto-biographical independent comic -- that was something truly new on the American comics scene in the 1960's and 1970's. I'd say he looms above it like a Titan, but I think he'd find the idea insulting. He's down on the street somewhere, looking for a jazz record, looking for a new used bookstore. Highly recommended.

Walk Like a Giant

Crumb: directed by Terry Zwigoff; starring Robert Crumb, Aline Kominsky, Charles Crumb, and Max Crumb (1994): Zwigoff's labour-of-love documentary, filmed over the course of nearly a decade, lays bare some of the tortured family and personal history of the great American writer-artist Robert Crumb. It also dwells too much upon the psychosexual aspects of Crumb's artistic output, leaving about 90% of his body of work underexplored.

I can see why this happens -- the psychosexual stuff is definitely the most provocative work for an audience that may not know Crumb or his output. Though they might have sat still for half-an-hour of Crumb's in-depth musings on music, 'authentic' culture, pop culture, or psychoanalysis. I guess we'll never know.

Crumb's interactions with his two brothers form the core of the movie's (unspoken) thesis -- that Crumb's ability to write and draw, and more importantly his ability to get that artistic output into the public eye, saved him from a life of psychological horror and isolated squalor. His two brothers are tragic wrecks -- highly intelligent, idiosyncratic artists themselves, and utterly damned by some combination of nature and nurture to lead secluded lives of quiet desperation. They are, quite simply, Robert Crumb as through a glass darkly.

Meanwhile, Crumb bops along, sometimes tortured himself but perpetually in motion, perpetually drawing (some of the most riveting scenes in the documentary simply show Crumb drawing -- and boy, is he fast and precise when he wants to be! His dialogue with his son comes across as a quick explanation of how an experienced cartoonist 'cheats' in order to create a specific effect, and should probably be required viewing for anyone with serious designs on being an artist).

Present and former girlfriends and wives show up to interact with Crumb and to delve into their relationships with him. Critics praise his work, or condemn it as being hateful of women and thus potentially dangerous (this was the height of McKinnon/Dworkin group-think about how pornography was in and of itself rape, as indeed were all heterosexual sex acts regardless of consent, because all male/female sex is rape...good times!).

Crumb himself comes across as seemingly disingenuous about the content of some of his work until one realizes that he simply can't afford the luxury of self-editing because people may get offended -- as he says at one point, if he doesn't draw and write out his thoughts, he starts to go crazy. In some cases, what's on the page seems to be spewed forth directly from his Id. Is it offensive? Oh, yeah, sometimes.

Is it Art? Oh, yeah -- the greatest body of work of any American writer-artist, ever. I'm not even sure if anyone is even close to Crumb's body of work and the now-fifty-year-long level of achievement therein. The gap between him and everyone else in his field in the United States is as great as the gap between Shakespeare and everyone else in English literature. Maybe greater. And all of it done singing out of darkness. Highly recommended.

Ragged Glory

The Complete Crumb Volume 15 by Robert Crumb (1983-1985; 2001): By the early 1980's, cartoonist and writer Robert Crumb was considered a has-been by a lot of people in the comics business, a relic of the Underground Comix of the 1960's and early 1970's whose time had come and gone. Crumb was well aware of this judgment.

And boy, were those people wrong.

What would instead soon happen would be Crumb's gradual and astounding Renaissance, one that has continued to this day. He'd work out new and commanding art styles, writing subjects, and obsessions. He'd co-edit the uneven but always fascinating and boundary-pushing Weirdo with young Turk Peter Bagge. He'd even release an album with his band of old-time blues aficiandos. And be the subject of a successful documentary. There's never been a second act in an American artist or writer's life to match it.

This volume, comprising material mostly from the years 1983-85, captures the beginnings of Crumb's recrudescence. Along with posters and book illustrations and covers for Weirdo, Volume 15 of the Complete Crumb also reprints the adventures of Mode O'Day, Crumb's take on early 1980's social climbing. Other media satires and commentaries appear, including Crumb's jeremiad against all post-1930 popular music and an unhinged Reagan-era take on Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

We also get his foray into the history of psychoanalysis, in which Crumb begins to work out the style he would refine and use over the next decades in his historical pieces, fine-lined and rigorously realistic without being photo-realistic, a style that would help make his recent adaptation of the Book of Genesis so compelling.

There's never really been anyone quite like Crumb in American art, comics, or letters. I suppose Mark Twain is the obvious comparison, but by the time he was in his 60's, Twain's best work was behind him. Crumb sometimes seems to be only getting started. He's a global treasure, and if any cartoonist should be the first to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, it's him in all his sweaty, fetishistic, frustrating, curmudeonly, humane, satiric glory. Actually, now I know who he reminds me of -- Neil Young, who also keeps trying to expand and improve while his contemporaries coast on past glories or slowly fade away. Highly recommended.

Dear God: The Jerk Store Called...

Comic:

The Book of Genesis, adapted and illustrated by Robert Crumb (2009): Robert Crumb is one of a handful of the world's greatest living cartoonists, given some fame outside comics by the documentary Crumb, which juxtaposed Robert with his sad and complicated siblings. Crumb came to fame in the 1960's as America's preeminent underground cartoonist. He became famous for creations that included Fritz the Cat (bastardized in a Ralph Bakshi animated movie), Mr. Natural, Shuman the Human and the seemingly ubiquitous 'Keep on Truckin'' logo that came to dominate T-shirts and bumper stickers without Crumb seeing a cent.

Since the 1970's, Crumb has widened and deepened his craft, the often insane sexual hijinks of his early work now complemented by pieces on the environment, on his family, on blues legends, on folk culture, and so on, and so forth. He's one of the relatively few living American artists who merits the accolade 'National treasure.'

And here, after five years of work, is his take on the first book of the Bible. And boy, is it a stunner. My only complaint about the volume is that Crumb can't possibly find time to adapt the entire Bible unless he lives as long as one of the Old Testament patriarchs whom he depicts, lovingly and warts-and-all, herein. If you read one chapter-by-chapter comics adaptation of a book of the Bible, make it this one!!!

Crumb's art is lovingly crafted, the research into dress and landscape fully integrated, the characters human and individual. Genesis is in many ways a book of horrors -- the expulsion from Eden, the Great Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. It's also a book in which almost everyone acts badly at least part of the time (Crumb supplies a couple of possible text-history explanations in the appendix for why Abraham keeps pimping out his wife to the rulers of the lands he visits, for instance). God is an arbitrary, vengeful, forgetful jerk who expels Adam and Eve from Eden as much for fear of what will happen if they manage to eat of the Tree of Life as for their sin of disobedience. Incest in various permutations is rampant. Even Joseph, in many ways the most sympathetic of characters (and, with 12 chapters devoted to him, the most fully realized) manages to put together a scheme whereby the Pharoah ends up owning the land of everybody in Egypt except the priests, making the entire population slaves (or serfs, if you wish). Good times, good times!

And through it all, Crumb's art keeps everything grounded in the normative, even the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart, if you will. His career-long fetishes about the female body mean that the matriarchs of Genesis are all big-breasted, big-bummed powerhouses, and there's certainly more female nippleage on display here, covered and naked, than in any previous rendition of a book of the Bible. That doesn't mean Crumb aims for the pornographic -- but sex (and all the attendant alliances and betrayals caused by it, trying to get it, and even trying, like Onan, to get out of it) is a major part of the Old Testament world. Crumb doesn't shy away from that.

All in all, an astonishing achievement of comics work. Highest recommendation.