 There is color in abundance, of various kinds, in Tom De Haven's magnificent new novel DERBY DUGAN'S DEPRESSION FUNNIES (Holt/Metropolitan, 0-8050-4445-0, $23). Set, lovingly and accurately, in the world of 1930's newspaper comics publishing, DERBY DUGAN chronicles three or more affairs of various sorts: platonic/romantic, as hack writer Al Bready wonders about his ongoing friendship with a married woman; platonic/creative, as Bready pairs with disagreeable, lecherous comic strip artist Walter Geebus to produce a work (the "Derby Dugan" of the book's title) greater than either man could have accomplished on their own; and the very real love affair that Bready and Geebus shared with the nation: our love affair with newspaper comic strips. In the 1930s Little Orphan Annie and Popeye and Flash Gordon and Barney Google shaped the nation as surely as did FDR and the Great Depression. The men who created these characters were true visionaries -- setting the dreams, the fancies, the whims, the outlandish hopeful adventurism and also the moral standards of the common American down on yellowing newsprint, in a palette of four versatile colors, in a medium controlled by magnates and distributed to broader effect and impact than any medium has achieved since, yes including television. But they were also human, and it's the human side of these visionary hacks that interests Mr. De Haven. A central point of his narrative is that the men who gave us The Funnies were not naturally amusing, charming, or even particularly happy human beings. They were just people, as fallible and as full of frustration as anyone else, perhaps more frustrated because they were compelled by the ambition and drive, the sensibility of artists -- though they were not, in their time, considered true artists (even by themselves). As a follow-up to De Haven's earlier Funny Papers (a big, ambitious, picturesque novel marred only by a weak ending), Derby Dugan is a sequel only in the sense that it shares a common setting and a couple of common characters; but Derby Dugan is far more mature, more humorous, more melancholy and more satisfying than anything De Haven has accomplished to date. Written in an authentic '30s New York prose style, its principal characters -- most especially Dugan artist Walter Geebus -- are more or less analogous to some real writers and artists of the time (the Dugan strip, which in the earlier novel was a fictionalized version of The Yellow Kid, has since evolved into a fictionalized version of Orphan Annie), but De Haven has humanized them in the way only novelists can: by inventing their hearts. Geebus is not merely a ranting, whoring right-wing extremist: he is essentially childlike and vulnerable. His partner Al Bready, narrator of the tale, is not merely bruised and fatalistic: he is aware that he has become the filter through which something greater than himself must pass. The relationships that De Haven writes about are difficult ones, all bound up in a four-colored thread. Like the relationships between characters in the best comic strips -- the Kats and Mice, the orphans and billionaires, the sailors and old maids -- they mean something that is not easily defined. Though DERBY DUGAN is the only novel we know of to come complete with its own Sunday comics page (drawn by Art Speigelman), it is far from being the first novel to draw its influence from the funnies. Lesser writers have been making hash out of the American comic strip for years. In KRAZY KAT: A NOVEL, one ill-advised scribbler had the balls to give Geo. Herriman's soulful feline a set of fully-functioning sex organs and a drive to match. The novel sank into deserved obscurity while Herriman's Kartoon Kat lives on blissfully in his eternally shifting, eternally enduring Coconino County built of decomposing newsprint and Dr. Martin's dyes. The same thing happened to Hergé's TINTIN a year or so later, when another writer with too much time (and perhaps other things) on his hands tried to posit the youthful adventure hero as a post-pubescent with a heat-seeking missile attached. We forget the name of the novel, and the novelist, but Hergé and Tintin and Snowy are still children, still solving foreign capers in the back of our minds. These idiot novelists all asking the same questions, all belaboring the obvious, all trying to drag the Funnies kicking and screaming into the real world are all missing the point, and dishonoring some of our best creative minds in the process. What Tom De Haven has done, in part, with Derby Dugan is to draw a bold, solid line between the funnies and the real world -- and then connect the two with dotted lines of hope, endurance, faith, love and aspiration. This is not a novel about the funnies, but a novel about the people who made them, the contradictory nature of the human heart, and "the better angels of our nature" that sometimes find fruition in populist art.
What if Theodore Geisel -- Dr. Suess to you and I -- had suffered the loss of a child, in consequence of which he fell into a deep depression, in consequence of which he was admitted to a psychiatric ward, in consequence of which he was exposed to an hallucinogenic drug that caused his wildest fantasies to take shape in the real world? What if American office buildings were slowly being taken over by the murmuring, shuddersome "Old Gods" from the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft? Like as not, those questions would never occur to you; but they did occur to William Browning Spencer, which is exactly what makes Spencer an instant and indispensable giant on our literary landscape. In ZOD WALLOP (St. Martin's, 0-312-13629-3, $21.95), children's author and illustrator Harry Gainsborough must shake off depression and drug haze to save the world from his own flying, nightmare creations, while simultaneously coming to grips with the death of his daughter and attempting to patch up what seems to be a terminally ruptured marriage. Here, fantasy and reality feed off of each other, and the one cannot be mended without the other. The novel almost doesn't survive it's loony-bin refugee supporting cast or the extremity of its fantasy; but Spencer's grip on Harry Gainsborough is rock solid, and the very real causes of Harry's breakdown are things that any reader can understand. Though filled with images as crazed as any you are likely to find between two covers, ZOD WALLOP is a realistic novel about grief, loss and the possibility of personal redemption; and it deals with those issues more effectively than many more straightfaced and straightlaced novels possibly could. Anyone who has ever held a job, or hopes to hold one, should read Spencer's RÉSUMÉ WITH MONSTERS (White Wolf, 1-56504-913-6, $5.99) and take heed. Here, a failed, middle-aged novelist named Philip Kenan begins to suspect that his job as a typesetter is more than deliberately dehumanizing: that, in fact, the demons Yog-Sothoth and C'thulu are using American businesses as a means of crossing over into the real world. Philip may be crazy; or he may not be. The question soon becomes irrelevant: because the demons and their slaves are real enough to Philip, and one way or another, whether in reality or within his own mind, he has to find a way to stop them. Ultimately, Philip's story is about self-worth, or lack of it, and the battle to live a satisfying life against overwhelming odds. Spencer calls this his "most autobiographical" novel and it should be easy for anyone working in an office building to see why. Though it shares similar themes with ZOD WALLOP -- loss of a loved one, mid-life crisis and the power of fantasy to focus and define the real world -- RÉSUMÉ WITH MONSTERS has its own agenda, one that will certainly cause you to rethink the prospect of life as a wage slave, and may even leave you peering watchfully into the dark corners of your workspace. William Browning Spencer doesn't mince words; his style is plain and unadorned; it is his images that carry the weight of his meaning. He is tuned more closely to the spirit of our times than any other working writer. He is the closest thing we have to a wild-eyed Romantic. We could use more like him. |
