I’ve been reading Im selben Boot (In the Same Boat) - a graphic novel about east and west German athletes post-fall of the wall (by Zelba) - that is so well-drawn and so confidently told that I’m fighting imposter syndrome again.
Writing such books confronts the artist with the serious challenge of adapting real life into autobiography. What are the significant moments that should be selected that together will tell this story?
Often the writer reaches for literary tools like foreshadowing and character development etc by collapsing several events or characters into one, by changing timelines, exaggerating the importance of a moment for frame or suspense, and so on. Everyone must worship at the altar that is Jason Lutes’ trilogy Berlin, where his invented characters live for our enlightenment the vertigo that was Weimar Berlin.
The work improves its appeal to audiences. Reading Stephen Pressfield is how I understood Thermopylae. Yet in many cases, most?, the work distorts reality so that the work is no longer education. Often this sacrifice is worthwhile in the pursuit of awareness raising, for example. Simplifying real life events to make them more palatable at least may result in whetting people’s appetites for facts, right? Based on a true story.
With all due respect to memoirists and the like - of which I am sort of a member, as some of my better works are autobiographical - I am still a bit freaked out by how little fiction there is in serious comics. Am I looking in the wrong places? Am I trying to find literature on the wrong bookshelf? Is fiction in our post-truth era dead, because truth is so appealing all by itself? Are we in a post-artifice era? Are there only a handful of comic artists allowed to produce works of fiction? Is there no market?
Or is it just too much to ask of a single author, that they should simultaneously possess the rare elixirs of creative writer, artist and cartoonist all in the same imagination?
I took out Adrian Tomine’s Killing and Dying translated into German (Eindringlinge) from the library the other day. I had not read it before. I made a deal with myself a few years ago, that - knowing I had time for making art or for anything else but not both - that I would do art.
This is why I have a complete script for Engineeress and eighty percent of my roughs and a bunch of completed line art and two children whom I have managed to keep alive... but I could not tell you what has been published recently.
So I got this book out of the library along with a few others. Then I ended up buying the book Long-Distance Cartoonist by the same guy, and I was a bit turned off and so I put Killing and Dying aside for a bit.
Anyway, when I got around to reading it, my expectations were low. I just thought it would elaborate on some of the angst he showed in Long-Distance Cartoonist. Not my thing.
But it is so lovely to climb down from a wrong opinion. (I love changing my mind.)
Killing and Dying was medicine. Comfort, though not because the themes are easy to swallow, or whatever.
Comforting because his short stories are lovely. They belong in comic form, they exploit the medium beautifully, though I don’t have the means to articulate how, not yet. And simultaneously the stories preserve the short story feel of great fiction. Economy, the short sharp glimpse.
I felt like I was reading fiction, and I love fiction. And I humbly thought it was quite good fiction.
Which always feels very good. Like a balm.
I am so relieved to find an author who treats this form, the wonderful graphic novel, in this way. As a form that enjoys the possibilities of both fiction and of art, shortcutting through layers of text description with an image, or in reverse relying on comic exposition over the tired fiction Modernist doctrine of Show Don’t Tell.
If you know others working in this way, please let me know!
I will go find his other books now.
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