Book Review: Drafted by Rick Parker

reviewed by Nicholas Wirtz, doctoral candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Oregon

Rick Parker. Drafted. Abrams ComicArts, 2024. 256 pp. $24.99 (Hardcover). ISBN 978-1-4197-6159-1. eISBN 978-1-64700-660-0. https://store.abramsbooks.com/products/drafted

 Rick Parker, early in his Vietnam War-era memoir Drafted, reflects on his 1966 induction into the United States Army, indicating his small, uniformed figure among the many marching through the snowy night, and writes “I kept reminding myself that I was just in the army, and not in some prison or concentration camp” (7). Rick the artistic naif has little time for the broader geopolitical tensions or ideologies that demand his conscription after losing his S-2 student deferment. His energy is devoted instead to the effects of his conscription, to surviving his coming-of-age in the military culture, and living under the threat that he will be sent to fight and die for, as one sergeant declares, “motherhood and apple pie!” (47).

Parker illustrates his memoir in a bulbous, gangly, at times grotesquely detailed style reminiscent of EC’s publications, an affinity which should come as no surprise, given his involvement in the 2007 Tales from the Crypt revival. Parker viscerally and vulnerably captures the discipline, bombast, and often painful humor of his experiences through his expressive illustrations. Any sense of their stylistic anachronism, fifty years removed in time, also offers synchrony, drawing us closer to the times and places of those experiences. Parker’s expressionistic cartooning also evokes for me Justin Green’s influential autobiographical Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. Parker shares Green’s emphasis on his own insecurities and abuses by authorities around him, but where Green emphasizes his unique subjectivity, Parker positions himself as an everyman.

Parker’s history and personality are in the foreground of the book, but often his character and narrative focuses on representing a common experience; many sequences, especially in boot camp, approach instruction manuals or montages, and they offer a general image of military life as much they more specifically represent his life. Drafted devotes few pages to Rick’s artistry at the time. His skills occasionally earn him friendship or disapproval, but they rarely mark his role as distinct from his contemporaries. Rick the artist emerges in his attention to rare flashes of silent, natural beauty that emerge in contrast with situations and shouted orders that demand his reaction. Parker is a keen observer, and it is in his observation that Drafted excels as art and finds value as history. He effectively caricatures his own cluelessness or others’ antagonism for sympathy or a laugh, but I find his demonstrative style most engaging when he shows others’ more nuanced distress, resentment, joy, or sympathetic understanding. That soldiers’ emotions are so dramatically cartooned as to be inescapable here, often seems to speak to how unmistakable and unforgettable these emotions are to him, and how he feels their experiences and communicates his empathy and concern, such as when Rick witnesses a sergeant beat a man under his command nearly to death over a practical joke. This empathetic recognition becomes a painful confession of the harm he knows he causes when, for instance, he draws the fearful face of a fellow officer candidate he abuses as punishment, on orders which he is sworn to obey.

The Vietnam War itself is absent from Drafted. Parker’s memoir is occasionally punctuated by references to Vietnam, but because he was never sent abroad, his attention remains with American military culture; the locales of Drafted are domestic, and its depicted violence is American in origin. When soldiers are killed or their rights ignored, Parker identifies with their shared mortality and subjection to a dysfunctional system, but seems to speak from a desire to tell, more than to judge. Parker’s pages are densely packed—with information, detail, texture, with barely contained captions and expressively lettered dialogue—a telling both urgent and claustrophobic, but his commentary remains remarkably restrained. Parker occasionally alludes to, or implicitly critiques, positions or policies, but by refraining from savvy, critical, or sardonic retrospective reflection, these comments, like his expressive cartooning, demonstrate his disciplined commitment to voicing an everyman soldier’s experiences and effectively ground Drafted in Rick’s “present.” Whereas a predictable anti-war moral might have rendered Parker’s emotional—often visceral—telling overwrought or didactic, his mix of personal honesty and ideological restraint instead offers an insightful portrait of this important time in American history. Writing as a teacher, I feel Parker’s dense style may represent a demanding adjustment for students but, with some guidance or in an advanced context, I expect students of history or comics would be well-rewarded by his voice and cartooning that draws us into Rick’s time.