Graphic Novel Review: Bald by Tereza Čechová (text) and Štěpánka Jislová (ill.)

 reviewed by José Alaniz, University of Washington, Seattle

Bald by Tereza Čechová (text) and Štěpánka Jislová (ill.); translated by Martha Kuhlman and Tereza Čechová. University Park, PA: Graphic Mundi, an imprint of Penn State University Press, 2024. 128 pages. $21.95. ISBN: 978-1-63779-080-9. https://www.graphicmundi.org/books/978-1-63779-080-9.html

Regarding the Czech comics domestic scene, as recently as 2020 scholar Pavel Kořínek could credibly opine: “[A]ny kind of subjective, personal recollection remains extremely rare. Czech comics seem — at least on their most superficial level — curiously de-personalized, de-subjectivized, with genre and fictional works predominant. For some reason, there have emerged very few overtly personal, autobiographical comics in the Czech tradition” (“Facets”: 91). 

    Such statements are less credible today, thanks to more recent publications such as veteran artist Lucie Lomová’s Every Day is a New Day: A Comics Diary (Každý den je nový: komiksový deník, 2022) — a work as personalized, subjectivized and autobiographical as anyone could want.

In fact, the landscape was shifting even as Koržínek’s original assessment was seeing print. That same year Czech publisher Paseka released the groundbreaking graphic memoir Bez Vlasů (literally “Without Hair”) by writer Tereza Čechová[1] and artist Štěpánka Jislová.[2] It dealt in intimate detail with the memoirist’s life after a diagnosis, at 30, of alopecia, an autoimmune condition that leads to hair loss. No comics work like it (certainly not in long form) had appeared in the Czech lands before. It would later win the Czech industry’s highest award, the Muriel Prize, for Best Comics Work.

2024 saw the English translation of Bez Vlasů, here rendered as Bald, from Graphic Mundi Press. It is translated by Čechová and Martha Kuhlman, professor of Comparative Literature at Bryant University in Providence, RI and one of the leading US scholars of Czech comics.[3]

It makes sense that Graphic Mundi, an imprint of Penn State University Press, would take up Čechová and Jislová’s prize-winning work, given its Graphic Medicine focus. Penn State is a major US node of the international Graphic Medicine movement, which centers graphic narrative representations of illness, disability and related medical themes.[4]

Bald certainly ventures deep into this territory; the heroine Tereza navigates — at times painfully — alopecia’s effect on her identity as a woman, love life, work relationships and even her pocketbook. I found these scenes on the day-to-day economics of her condition the most illuminating: she expounds on the cost of medication, therapists, wigs, head coverings of different sorts. We also get fascinating discussions on the hair of different races and ethnicities, as well as on the culture and mythology of hair (Samson and Rapunzel are just the tip of the iceberg).

All this is rendered in Jislová’s clean, almost schematic line that exudes a cartoony dynamism. The book uses a two-color scheme of black lines with light reds to produce numerous effects, like the “ghost hair” which Tereza has lost. (In this, Bald recalls Georgia Webber’s split-identity techniques in her 2018 memoir Dumb: Living Without a Voice.)

The author’s one-year journey as depicted makes for quite an emotional roller coaster: despair rubs elbows with enlightened self-acceptance. A storytelling workshop in Scotland proves cathartic. Tereza, like many people nowadays, seeks solace on the internet, only to find confusion and – who’da thunk? – misinformation. A brilliant page design reifies her anxieties and stresses into a fractured three-tier portrait as our narrator tries desperately to forestall the inevitable with useless pills and creams. Another rather chilling episode portrays her at her job, “dealing” with her hair loss by trying to ignore it with overwork. Over eight panels, she melts down in tears before her laptop, then resumes typing with a smile. Finally, another portrait, a splash, shows her weeping on an armchair as supportive comments roll in after her first posting online about her alopecia. This brief catalogue gives a sense, I hope, of Bald’s dizzying affective spectrum. Overall, it paints a powerful picture of physical difference and its mental health/social/cultural ramifications in late capitalism.   

As Čechová told Czech Radio, “I was really worried that the result would seem depressing, because the comic does describe something that is very difficult. But it also brings with it a lot of funny moments. We wanted to show that even if you go through something like this, the world doesn’t fall apart” (Jančíková, “Cesta”). Yet even the “funny moments” tend to have their edge. At one point, Tereza’s boyfriend tells her, “The hair is fine. But not having eyebrows is creepy.” Given that one of Tereza’s fears is living life alone due to her hair loss, that comment seems less than reassuring. 

Other moments I found borderline disturbing. Trying to make herself feel better about her condition at times leads to some dark corners, like this statement, which sounds lamentably eugenicist: “I often think we had it coming. Humans no longer need their hair. It’ll disappear in time. Evolution. Maybe I’m a member of a new … more perfected race. But let me tell you, it’s not easy being one of the first.” This textbox accompanies another portrait, of a half-naked Tereza crying in the mirror.

Something else which some may find rather distancing about Bald: what at times seems like a willful opacity. By that I mean the text proceeds with great economy, with an average of only about 20-25 words per page. It’s almost telegraphic. This puts more of a burden on the art to carry the narrative, which Jislová does more than capably. However, some choices have the effect of keeping the reader (this one, anyway) at arm’s length. Jislová’s figures do not have eyeballs, just black dots for eyes, and a puppet-like angularity to them (Tereza’s nose looks like a sort of stylized diamond or arrow point). This choice risks narrowing the expressive latitude of the characters, like watching a drama acted out with dolls. (Maybe Jiří Trnka dolls? Though a lot of them had eyeballs.) So that when Tereza has tears streaming down her cheeks it might look to some readers as simply grotesque, and be less likely to provoke empathy/understanding.

Furthermore, Čechová’s low word-count writing has a similar coldness and detached matter-of-factness, even when discussing depression, social anxiety, desire. The author seems to acknowledge this stance in a scene where she and her boyfriend are having trouble communicating. “How hard it is for me to talk to anyone about my feelings,” she says in a caption. Finally, I would have appreciated it if Bald had interrogated the class conditions underlying Tereza’s experiences; this is a very middle-class portrait of alopecia, despite the occasional nods to how people without Tereza’s privileges might fare very differently in contemporary Czech society.

These quibbles aside (which in any case might have more to do with my own tastes as a comics reader), Čechová and Jislová’s graphic memoir deserves its reputation for taking Czech comics where they had never ventured before – potently so. As Koržínek himself put it, in a quote highlighted on Paseka’s web page devoted to Bald: “Frankly authentic, light-hearted storytelling, in the context of Czech comics, feels a bit like an epiphany.” All this and cartoony anthropomorphic white blood cells too!

More than anything else, as a graphic memoir, Bald secures Czech comics’ further imbrication with global comics culture. Paseka itself leans into this facet on its web page, claiming the work “continues the rich tradition of autobiographical comics from around the world.” Transnational comics flows (analyzed so well by scholars like Daniel Stein and Kate Kelp-Stebbins) make such a work as Bald all but inevitable, it seems.

Its authors, both born in the post-communist 1990s, represent a younger generation much more closely tied to graphic narrative beyond Czechia’s borders, to say nothing of Central/Eastern Europe’s. Jislová told me she greatly admires Tillie Walden, Kate Beaton, Alison Bechdel and Ulli Lust, global stalwarts all. This makes Bald a work that is very self-aware about the non-Czech traditions that it’s tapping and incorporating. “We felt, as we were working on the book, that this is the first time we’re doing something like this in the Czech comics scene [on this scale],” she said (Jislová interview).

More than anything, the graphic memoir genre gave Čechová and Jislová a framework for a story that they felt had to be told this way. “I’m a big fan of autobiographical comics,” said Čechová, “because they can debunk (detabuizovat) many things and reveal that which we’re not used to talking about. That’s why I started to think that something could come from my experiences” (Jančíková, “Cesta”).

The genie is definitely out of the bottle now. Working on Bald led to Jislová first hitting on the idea of pursuing her own autographical work. The result was her own graphic memoir, Srdcovka (2023). The title is a hard-to-translate slang term that means basically something close to one’s heart and/or that inspires devotion/obsession. It deals with heartbreak, growing up as part of the first generation after communism, sexual abuse and artistic coming of age. Heartcore, the book’s English translation, is due to appear later this year (also from Graphic Mundi, with Kuhlman again translating).

Apart from the authors, the US press and translator deserve praise for bringing this work to an English-speaking readership. We on these shores are chronically, disgracefully bereft of translations of the world’s many vibrant comics cultures, especially those with less common languages like Czech. Thank you.

Kuhlman told me that she and Graphic Mundi had decided on Bald (instead of, say, “Hairless”) for the translated title in part because the English word resonated with “bold.” That adjective, though not at all implied in the original Czech, nonetheless applies to this book – in more ways than one.  

 A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 26:2.

Bibliography

Jančíková, Šárka. “Cesta hrdinky. Autobiografický komiks Bez vlasů o zkušenostech s alopecií se nebojí těžkých témat ani humoru.” Český rozhlas (November 2, 2020). https://vltava.rozhlas.cz/cesta-hrdinky-autobiograficky-komiks-bez-vlasu-o-zkusenostech-s-alopecii-se-8352800.   

Kořínek, Pavel. “Facets of Nostalgia: Text-Centric Longing in Comics and Graphic Novels by Pavel Čech.”  Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections. Eds. Martha Kuhlman & José Alaniz. University of Leuven Press, 2020:

Interview with Štěpánka Jislová. Prague. June, 2024.

Paseka web page devoted to Bez Vlasů. https://www.paseka.cz/produkt/bez-vlasu/

 ------------------------

[1] Tereza Čechová (née Drahoňovská) (b. 1990) studied journalism and media sciences at Charles University in Prague. She and Jislová established the Prague branch of Laydeez Do Comics, a British women-led comics organization which advances the work of female comics-makers.

[2] Štěpánka Jislová (b. 1992) is a graduate of the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art in Plzeň. She has published in several Czech and international comics collections. She also contributed to the monumental history comics series The Czechs (Češi, 2013-2016) and illustrated the graphic biography Milada Horáková (2020), written by Zdeněk Ležák. Her more recent work includes the superhero satire Supro: Heroes on Credit (Hrdine na dluh, 2023).

[3] Full disclosure: Kuhlman is a friend; we co-edited the collection Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections (University of Leuven Press, 2020). She provided me with a copy of Bald for review.  

[4] Penn State published my 2019 co-edited study, with Scott T. Smith, Uncanny Bodies: Superhero Comics and Disability.

 

Graphic Novel Review: Sunday, by Olivier Schrauwen

reviewed by Luke C. Jackson

Olivier Schrauwen, Sunday. Fantagraphics, 2024. US $39.99. ISBN: 9781683969679. https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/sunday

Highly regarded Belgian cartoonist Olivier Schrauwen is known for producing both short- and long-form comics that combine moments of absurdity and surrealism with in-depth characterisation that often depict the inner lives of men living in isolation. He brings a new level of depth to this type of character study in Sunday, a 472-page graphic novel from Fantagraphics.

Sunday is regarded by many cultures as a day of rest, relaxation, and contemplation. In his eponymously-named graphic novel, Schrauwen depicts a fictionalised account of the life of his cousin, Thibault, a thoroughly ordinary man, on a largely uneventful Sunday. By offering a nearly minute-by-minute account of Thibault’s physical experiences and mental processes between 8:15am, when he awakens, and midnight, Schrauwen invites the reader to inhabit the world, and consciousness, of his protagonist. In this way, his approach is reminiscent of early Modernist novels, including Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses, both of which were set in a single location on a single day, and are particularly remarkable for their use of interiority, which creates a level of intimacy and identification with their lead characters. According to notes provided by Schrauwen in his introduction, he was attracted to the project because it would give him the opportunity to use the comics medium to create something ‘beautiful’ from what his cousin Thibault described as a ‘wasted day’. Such days are those filled with ‘procrastination, aimlessness and boredom, in which [Thibault] failed to do anything edifying’.

In trying to find a way to describe how Schrauwen achieves this feat, it might be most appropriate to look at music. Certainly, music features in the graphic novel explicitly. Thibault wakes up with the song ‘Sex Machine’ in his head, an ironic theme song to the first two hours of his day given what can only be described as his ambivalent relationship to actual sex with his girlfriend, Migali, a visual artist who is on her way home after weeks spent engaged in collaborative art in an unnamed African village. While she has been immersed in African culture in reality, the closest Thibault gets is playing West African music on his turntable while imagining the band surrounding him in his unremarkable apartment. Another live music performance is featured when Nora, a previous love interest of Thibault’s, and Thibault’s cousin Rik, are depicted attending a piano concert, while – much later – a parallel is drawn between a mole on Nora’s face and the symbol for a pause in musical annotation.

However, the graphic novel’s musical connection runs deeper than these explicit references to artists, bands, and musical notation. Like a conductor on a stage, Schrauwen has utilised words, images, and the spatial elements of the page control the reader’s perception and experience. Indeed, Schrauwen is ever-present within the text. In the introduction, he provides ‘reading instructions’, along with a self-portrait, and later appears as an illustrated version of himself, to offer a brief commentary on his cousin’s character. Schrauwen’s illustration style is equal parts impressionistic and realistic, like a rough and slightly naïve rotoscope. Spatially, while he has chosen to depict the world of the text largely from eye-level in a series of close-ups, mid-shots and wide shots of the type familiar to filmgoers, there are instances of more dynamic representation, as the camera floats above our protagonist and even tours the galaxy, the latter a product of Thibault’s fantastical imaginings.

Reinforcing the link between layout and Thibault’s subjective experience, when he smokes marijuana, the panels depicting the experiences of the secondary characters whose experience he is not privy to, become far less linear. Some panels snake around the page, while the frames of others melt and merge together. At the same time, the page numbers become unmoored from their usual place at the bottom of the page, rearranging themselves almost randomly before disappearing altogether. Thibault’s thoughts are similarly jumbled, with some of his words appearing enlarged, making them impossible to read, while others run in circles and even backwards. It is in these moments that Sunday’s most outstanding – and most musical – feature can be seen clearly. This is what Daniel Albright has referred to as Modernist music’s ‘testing of the limits of aesthetic construction’. 

In these ways, this graphic novel defies categorisation. It is a depiction of banality that is anything but banal, and an exploration of the life of an unremarkable man that is nevertheless remarkable. In this way, it’s a book about all of us … whether we’d like to admit it or not. Thibault (or perhaps it is Olivier Schrauwen, speaking through Thibault) says as much when he suggests, ‘I’m holding up a mirror … so you can recognize your flawed selves.’ Sunday shows how, when viewed from the right perspective, what might otherwise be dismissed as a ‘wasted day’ can have value and – yes – even beauty.

 A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 26:2.

 

An Evening with Jules Feiffer at the Cosmos Club in 2007

 The great cartoonist Jules Feiffer has passed away. IJOCA ran this interview in print in Fall 2008. 

An Evening with Jules Feiffer

By Alan Fern

 

The late Dr. John P. McGovern established an award program at the Cosmos Club Foundation in Washington, D.C., to recognize people of achievement in science, literature, and the arts. Each recipient is asked to speak about his or her work and career. Past recipients have included Mstislav Rostropovich, Carlos Fuentes, Joyce Carol Oates, Edward O. Wilson, Maya Lin, Saul Bellow, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, J. Craig Venter, Derek Jacobi, Michael Frayn, and Wole Soyinka, among many others. Jules Feiffer received theaward on April 30, 2007, at the Cosmos Club in Washington. Feiffer gave a slide presentation on his work and read sections from his autobiography-in-progress. The following is a transcript of the third part of the evening, an interview with Foundation trustee Alan Fern and Feiffer’s responses to questions from the audience.

 Alan Fern: I’m going to start with a couple of questions I was thinking about, just to get Jules rolling and then we’ll ask you [in the audience] to think about what you’d like to ask. One subject we haven’t talked about very much tonight was really the beginning of your cartoon career with Will Eisner. We mentioned that in this little biographical statement [in the award program], but someone named Michael Rhode who is a cartoon specialist, contacted me and said, “By the way, [DC Comics is] just reprinting an issue [of The Spirit] which, supposedly under Eisner’s signature, in 1947, but really drawn by Feiffer, shows Eisner getting killed…

 Jules Feiffer: Yes… I killed him.

 AF: …so the apprentice could take over the strip. You killed him. So tell me about it. What kind of a way is that to repay your mentor?

 JF: I forget how that happened. First of all, Eisner was my hero as a kid, when I was ten, eleven, and twelve. The three cartoonists I was crazy about were Roy Crane, who did Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, Milton Caniff, who did Terry and the Pirates, and Eisner. In particular, Eisner and Caniff I loved most because they combined words and pictures, they told stories, they created characters that were infinitely more grounded, nuanced and sophisticated than anyone else. It was quite remarkable what they did. Caniff in daily and Sunday strips and Eisner in the comics, particularly with the Spirit which ran as a supplement, a comic book supplement, first sixteen pages and then eight pages, in Sunday newspapers. In 1946, just out of high school, I took my samples and looked up Eisner in the phone book, and there he was – 37 Wall Street – and I went down there, terrified, but it was easier for me to walk in than call him up on the phone. I could never have done that. He was there in the outer office, where you’d think a secretary would be. He was there in his dark room just working on the Spirit. I was very excited. He couldn’t have been more friendly and and he asked to see my samples. In a very friendly way, he looked at them, and in a very friendly way, he said I had no talent at all…

 [audience laughs]

 …and that the stuff was awful. Which really troubled me because I hated to hear the truth in those years. But I had long ago established a habit of responding to unpleasant truths by not hearing them, or changing the subject, and I sure as hell was not going to walk out of this meeting with Will Eisner, my hero, with my tail between my legs, being told I had no talent. This was not the way this was going to end, so I started improvising and the only thing I could think of talking about was him and his work. Now here was a guy who had revolutionized comic book art and he had three highly crafted professionals in the other room who didn’t give a damn about his work. Who thought he was kind of out of date, and didn’t know anything about his career, and then he met me and I had a whole dossier. I knew everything he ever had done. I could talk about it not just as a little boy, but as a knowledgeable fan. He had no choice but to hire me as a groupie.

 [audience laughs]

 AF: So then you kill him off?!

 JF: Well after two or three years, even as a groupie, he’s your boss. You get pissed off at him. [laughs] Because I couldn’t do anything around the office that was any good, he just tried me out on writing the Spirit stories and it turned out I could write a lot better than I could draw those things. So I became the writer. As I said at the time, I was the Spirit’s ghost.

 AF: That leads to in fact another question. I have long wondered… I have known you for a good many years, and admired you enormously – all aspects of your work. You’ve often said in your public utterances that you always wanted to be a cartoonist. And yet so much of your work, besides cartooning, displays this great gift for narrative and dialogue. Of course, your prose writing is very lucid and good. Did you know as a young man that you were talented as a writer and did you just keep it quiet because you didn’t think you could convince your mother that it would be ok to be a writer?

 JF: Good question. I had a sister four years older, my Communist sister. She was the writer in the family.

 AF: Ahhh…

 JF: Those roles were so pre-assigned, and she was the first female editor of our high school newspaper. She had a great high school career. And like so many people who are great in high school, and then disappear afterwards, she was one of those. But I was thoroughly intimidated by her as a writer and never tried writing. I would scribble out some stories, never finish them, and they weren’t very good. I always wanted to write my own cartoons. To my thinking, the great cartoonists were the ones who wrote their own stuff. To the extent I thought about writing, I thought about it as an illustrator about my comic strips…

 AF: But how does that relate to the movies?

 JF: …only when I started watching ‘50s television drama… there was a period in the early ‘50s, on Sunday nights – live television, Philco Playhouse – and there was Paddy Chayefsky whoever the hell he was and Tad Mosel whoever the hell he was and Horton Foote whoever the hell he was … these brilliant writers emerging and writing one hour television dramas and they were accessible and they were brilliantly written and they connected to me as a member of the audience far more than most theater I was seeing at the time, and I went to a lot of theater. And I thought maybe I could do that, because it wasn’t a play. It wasn’t on Broadway. It wasn’t on the stage. I thought, “It’s only television, maybe I could do it.” Because it’s like a comic strip, it seemed somewhat lower in esteem, I thought, “Well, I’m low esteem enough to do this low esteem writing” and for the first time started fooling around theatrically. Prior to that I never had any ambition and those attempts at writing good television were aborted too. I never finished anything. The way I got into theater was… my joke about the Paris Review crowd telling me that I was really a playwright, not a cartoonist, is only a slight exaggeration. Second City in Chicago opened a theater next door – this is shortly after they had been running successfully and changing the face of comedy along with Nichols and May – and the theater they were opening next door was not going to be improvisation. It was going to be called Playwrights at Second City and they asked me if I would do an adaptation of my cartoons. So the first thing I wrote theatrically was taking my comic strips from the [Village] Voice and breaking them down into a two-act form. And then Paul Sills the director came to the surprising stunning conclusion for him, that none of these things ran more thirty or forty seconds. “It’s too short. We need something longer. Can you write something longer?” So I wrote something longer, and then he wanted something even longer and then I wrote a one-act play. Which he hated. [laughs] But when I wrote the one-act play, I thought, “I can do this. I know how to do this.” I mean I didn’t know that I knew how to do this. When we later took that show which was the first thing Mike Nichols was going to direct, and took it out on the road in summer stock in New Jersey, Mike took that play that Paul Sills didn’t like at all and did a wonderful production of it. So that’s when I realized that I could do this. I had my own way of working…

 AF: That leads me to another question that I’ve been thinking of. Here you just demonstrated that one director can do something with your work much better than another director might. When you’ve written plays or movies, have you had specific actors in mind, or specific directors to do it, or have you just done it and then let the thing fall where it might?

 JF: Well every time I had a specific actor… when I wrote Little Murders, the actor I had in mind was Walter Matthau and he didn’t understand a word of it. Every time I’ve ever had an actor in mind… when I sent Mike Nichols the script of Little Murders when I first wrote the play, I never heard back from him. Not a response. And we were friends and we had worked together. It just infuriated me. I thought I’d cut him cold when I saw him. We didn’t speak to each other for two years. When The Graduate was about to open I went to a screening hoping it would be a big flop, just wishing him very very poorly – disaster. I’m sitting in this audience -- this film hasn’t opened yet and it hasn’t been reviewed – there’s no advance word on it. This is a PR audience … these are people that work in the business … they haven’t been told how to react. So they sat through the movie without a peep, without a laugh, without anything, because they hadn’t been told that it was great. And I sat there inhaling this thing from the very first shot in the film where Dustin Hoffman is riding this subway as his plane lands at LAX, and I couldn’t believe what I was watching – it was so brilliant. All of my anger at Mike disappeared because I was seeing what he and Elaine had done and what I had been trying to do in my work just put on a whole different level – an extraordinary new level – and I wrote him a fan letter and sent it to him. I heard back the next day by messenger so we were back on again as friends, and when I wrote Carnal Knowledge I sent it to him and he called me back twenty-four hours later and said, “I don’t think it’s a play, I think it’s a movie. Let me do it as a movie.” And I said, “What about the language?” He said, “We won’t have any problem.” So we did it as a movie. And it was the best working experience I’ve ever had in film.

 AF: Before we open for questions from everyone, I have one question been dying to ask you about the movies. Both in Carnal Knowledge and Little Murders at several places there’s a completely black screen and a lot of stuff happens behind the black screen and then finally it emerges. In Carnal Knowledge is also a white screen and suddenly you get actors emerging. Now, was that your idea or the director’s idea?

 JF: In both cases, it was the director’s idea.

 AF: Was it.

 JF: Yes, yes.

 AF: Two different directors?

 JF: Actually Nichols wanted to open, and did open Carnal Knowledge with Jack and Artie talking under the credits and then slowly the room fades in and you see that, but that wasn’t my concept. And the ice skater who’s the transitional figure that one sees in white is not in the script. Mike came up with that as a symbol of…

 AF: So Arkin was imitating Mike…

 JF: Uhhh, no actually that was before. The film of Little Murders came before Carnal Knowledge.

 AF: Anyway, let’s see what you [in the audience] would like to ask Jules.

 Audience Member: Am I the only one who sees Giacometti in your work?

 JF: Well, you know, I don’t see Giacometti in my work, but I can see where you might. He learned a lot from me, Giacometti. [audience laughs] But there was a brilliant illustrator and artist of the 1930s and 40s who lived in London. He was Polish. Named Feliks Topolski. And he put out on butcher paper something Topolski’s Weekly or Topolski’s Journal and he just drew scenes around London with this loose charcoal pencil line. I thought this is how I … I mean I could never come near his skill, but that’s what I wanted my drawing to look like. And it’s also in the tradition of those Daumier sketches that are wildly loose and free. Being loose and free, that has always been what interested me about drawing. Not to do a tightly rendered sketch, but just to make it happen … like a Fred Astaire dance actually. I mean it’s dancing on paper.

 AM: Jules, with newspapers becoming kind of a dinosaur, what would a Jules Feiffer in 2007 choose as a vehicle.

 JF: There can’t be a Jules Feiffer in 2007 because all of us are creatures of the time we are brought up in and come to maturity and you’re basically controlled by the influences around you. I mean Art Spiegelman works almost solely on a computer now, doing his drawings that way. But Art is, I don’t know, twenty years younger than I am, and knows how to do this. I can’t even turn on a computer. It changes with each generation. The smarter ones are the ones who can go back and be informed by earlier work, but what they do is very much of their time and of their keeping. My style could not have evolved if there had not been a host of people like William Steig before me and Saul Steinberg and Andre Francois and Walt Kelly… I mean all of these went into the making of what I ended up doing… Robert Osborne… I mean there’s just a whole bunch of them.

 AM: I wanted to ask you about another one – Abner Dean.

 JF: I loved him! He was a friend of mine.

 AM: Abner Dean is much more gloomy than you are, but he has a kind of wit…

 JF: But his people were naked! It was disgusting. [laughs]. Abner Dean did these full page New Yorker cartoons of neurotics in situations, but his drawing didn’t influence me because he drew very tightly. He was very tight and he did washes. He was a wonderful, very sweet man and he was very very kind to me when I was starting out. I liked him enormously.

 Michael Rhode: I picked up Feiffer on Nixon over the weekend, and I was struck at how if you just changed the faces, over 90% would still be applicable.  I was wondering if you could address that and how much you miss having a forum where you could do political strips again?

 JF: Oh, I don’t really miss doing the political strips. I did them for so many years, and my god, I had the best. I had Richard Nixon working for me. Then I had Ronald Reagan, who actually meant what he said, which was so amazing… because it was all wrong… and changed the country. I mean, he got rid of the New Deal all by himself practically. I had LBJ who gave us the credibility gap. There was a story that reporters talked about when LBJ was president. “How do you know when the President is telling the truth and when he’s lying?” “When he looks at you straight in the eye, he’s telling the truth. When he leans back in his chair, he’s telling the truth. When he puts his hands behind his neck, he’s telling the truth. When he scratches his nose, he’s telling the truth. When he opens his mouth, he’s lying.” [audience laughs]

 AM: It’s hard to follow that. Can you just describe the creative process that you go through when you come up with an idea? Is it the drawing first and then the idea? Does it ever happen that way? Or is it the concept first in your mind?

 JF: It has happened first, but mostly it’s the other way. Usually when it’s the drawing first, it’s because I can’t think of an opening line, I can’t think of anything, but usually I script it on a sheet of yellow paper or whatever there is around. It’s very much like cabaret, or comic improv as I saw at Second City or Nichols and May or others… [such as] The Committee [Theater] in San Francisco. When you give an actor an opening line and he or she has to run with it, and it may involve another character, essentially that’s what I still do on paper. I start writing something and I don’t know where it’s going and I don’t want to know where it’s going. I deliberately don’t want to second-guess myself. I don’t want to use my brain in this at all. I just want my hand to control, because everything I do is in longhand, I want my hand to control what it is that’s coming out. And often, if it’s going to be any good, I’m quite surprised at what comes out on paper. I find, as in writing the memoir or writing a play, the work is not very good until I lose control of it. When the characters or the story I’m telling takes over and I’m not in charge of it, then it’s going to be good. I have a good chance of making it work.

 AF: I know half a dozen of you still have questions to ask, but I’m going to put an end to the formal question and answer period. I’m going to remind you that upstairs we will have ample opportunity to chat with Jules, ask more questions, learn more about his work. The ideal McGovern evening it seems to me is one in which a creative person lets us see a bit about what his work has been and how he does it and I think that Jules has done both of those things admirably and we’re very much in his debt. It’s been a wonderful evening.

 

Transcribed by Michael Rhode, from a tape provided by the Cosmos Club.

 

Graphic Novel Review: Woman & Man+

 reviewed by C.T. Lim

Craig Yoe. Woman & Man+. Clover Press, 2024. https://cloverpress.us/products/woman-man

Craig Yoe is best known as an editor and publisher of archival comic book compilations (usually those that have fallen out of copyright) that he put together under his own imprint Yoe Books and for other publishers like Abrams, Fantagraphics, IDW and Dark Horse. He has not drawn a comic book for decades, but since moving to Bagio City in the Philippines recently, he has come out with Woman & Man+. 

The backmatter of the book encourages an autobiographical reading: "A wildly surreal autobiographical story of Yoe losing his love, his country, and some say - his sanity - and his struggle to reinvent himself." Yoe himself proclaimed, "This humble underground comix / pretentious-art book is a psychedelic telling of my fleeing the U.S. to hook up with the underground comix comrades in Berlin, then booted out of Germany to find solace - then devastating heartbreak - in the Canary Islands. Finally the Philippines have granted me asylum... and hope." In his introduction, Yoe explains he was mentally and emotionally in a bad place where he had no choice but to draw Woman & Man+ to survive and to find hope. Thus, this book is art therapy. 

One would be hard-pressed to see the above-described journey of NY-Berlin-Canary Island-the Philippines in the art and story. As described in the backmatter, it is a surrealistic landscape of Dali and Hieronymus Bose mixed with Robert Crumb. Animation Magazine described this book, "like Dr Seuss on acid!" It is pop art by way of 1970s underground comix (the period when Craig started doing comics) as we have Minnie Mouse, Batman (Adam West), Nancy, Snoopy, Korky the Cat and even Mr Monopoly made their guest appearances. The art is reminiscent of Keiichi Tanaami, but without the vibrant colors. It is closer to what the late Rick Griffin (an old friend of Craig's back in the day) or S. Clay Wilson may have done if they were still alive, and working with the heavy black and whites. In a way, Craig is the link between the 1970s underground comix and the 2000s alternative comics of Dave Cooper. Craig's position has always been that comics are not meant to be taken too seriously. They are not high art but rather, in this book, it is “Yoe-brow.”

The bottom line: the way to appreciate Woman & Man+ is to let its stream of consciousness sweep over you and go with the flow. Is it about the eternal struggle between the passions of men and women? Maybe. Some might want a stronger narrative structure like the wordless comics of Phil Yeh (another artist of Craig's generation), but we should take Woman & Man+ as it is. Craig is approaching his mid-70s soon. It will be a pity if he does not write and draw more at this late stage of his career. Maybe the cool air of Bagio City will do him some good and we will see more of his art. 

In his 70s, Craig Yoe continues to be on the road.

( photo by CT Lim)

 

Graphic Novel Review: The Incredible Story of Cooking: From Prehistory to today, 500,000 years of adventure.

 reviewed by Cord Scott, UMGC Asia

Stephane Douay and Benoist Simmat and Montana Kane (translator).  The Incredible Story of Cooking: From Prehistory to today, 500,000 years of adventure. NBM Publishing, 2024. ISBN 9781681123417. https://nbmpub.com/products/the-incredible-story-of-cooking

One of the simplest, yet most complex of basic needs, is food.  We need it to survive, but in this era of food on demand in the industrialized world, we have come to take it for granted unless it is not to our taste, or even expected taste.  Through the development of food preparation, Douay and Simmat take us into the history of cooking.  While such a momentous undertaking may seem impossible, the creators give the reader a good overview of how we have come to develop our collective culinary skills.

As with any historical text, sourcing of information is important, and this book does go into a variety of sources from centuries of written material.  It also relies on information from academics, cultural anthropologists, and historical accounts to give us an interaction of food and the development of society as a whole.

The book is divided into nine general chapters, with a final chapter centered on recipes for dishes made during historical times, as previously referenced in the book.  The first chapter covers the most time, from various proto humans through to the last ice age of approximately 9000 years ago.  This chapter goes into detail as to the types of food eaten, mostly through gathering of what could be foraged while watching what other animals ate to determine what was edible versus poisonous.  Many of the anecdotes on the developments of cooking are illustrated by humorous interactions of random characters and give the stories a human quality.

The first chapter also emphasizes the importance of preservation, such as lacto-fermentation as well as that of cold storage and other methods for preservation of foods.  The domestication of grains allowed for the later concepts of farming.  These concepts allowed people to sustain themselves for longer periods of time and therefore settle into one area.  This in turn allowed societies to work on permanent structures, develop written language and even preserve history.  Some of the basic diets from this era have come back into vogue, as is referenced later in the last chapter about food sustainability and diet.

The middle chapters deal with the rise of ancient civilizations such as Sumer, Egypt, Greece and Rome, and how their dietary habits influenced the rest of the world.  The authors state the creation of alcoholic beverages was important, but did not address the issue of why water was not used (due to contaminants).  This may be simply thought to be common knowledge, clean water is something taken so much for granted in the Western World, that the recent widespread development of it often is unstated in historical settings.

The link between food and trade is also explored in the middle chapters.  The idea of Chinese cuisine, going along the “silk road” towards the West, where concepts such as pasta were altered to suit needs and adapt to local grains was important.  This migration of spices, foods and preparation methods is often understated except when it leads to crises, such as the South American potato being introduced in Europe, only to be dismissed as an unfit food item for any but animals or the poor.

Douay does a nice job of explaining the traditional aspects of kitchen duties in the ancient world through the present day.  He highlights the idea of the importance of food as haute cuisine to diplomacy and status. He also explains the development of the modern restaurant concept, gastronomy (an ancient Greek word, revitalized by the French in the later 1800s) and the idea of standardization of food preparation.

The final chapters deal with food preservation in terms of cans and the creation of the food industry.  For this section, Douay notes the industrialization of the meat packing industry in Cincinnati and Chicago, to the phases of “pure foods” promoted such as Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Graham Crackers (p. 190).  Inevitably, any discussion of modern food leads to American fast food and its impact on the global scale as well as that of general nutrition.

The last part of the book glosses over more recent trends in terms of food security and availability.  More could have been written on these more present trends.  One “new” trend is that of getting protein through the consumption of insects to reduce the land needed for cattle; however, the idea of eating insects existed in many ancient cultures.  The new food movement recipe on page 214 for sustainable soup, using scraps of food, actually is what needed to be done for most of human history until very recently. Lastly, newer movements in cooking, such as the “slow food movement” are discussed as moves towards the future.

One of the few areas where I would have liked to see a bit more information is for spices and their use in southern climates.  It seems counterintuitive, but the idea that spicy food makes one sweat, and hence cool off, is not addressed aside from a quick reference.  Overall, the book is one that will give a basic overview of the culinary world, and it is an interesting one.  The recipes are ones that are also interesting but may or may not be practical in a current setting.