Funny Book Review Revue

by Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel

(Vertigo) $19.99.

Jonathan Ames is probably one of the funniest personal

essayists alive, and his 2004 Wodehouse-humping novel
Wake
Up, Sir proves that he’s probably one of the few real wits in the
business today. You’d think this comic, loosely based on Ames’s
experiences as a hopeless alcoholic, would be painfully funny and
honest, perhaps along the lines of Augusten Burroughs’s Dry. But
why is his script for The Alcoholic so bland?

Dean Haspiel is a very fine comic creator in his own right. His
Billy Dogma comics are a bizarre commingling of Jack Kerouac and
Jack Kirby, of romance and action. The Alcoholic marks Haspiel’s
second collaboration with a well-regarded writer—the first was
the 2005 snoozefest The Quitter with Harvey Pekar—and the
result is equally dull.

A well-written comic book takes full advantage of the blending of
words and images. There’s none of that here. “Jonathan A,” an Ames
look-alike, narrates much of the book while covered in sand underneath
a pier, ostensibly hiding from the police after a particularly vicious
bender. Unfortunately, Haspiel can’t draw sand, so it looks as though
Jonathan, like the plot of this book, has been stuck in a block of
concrete. Haspiel’s great strength—melding action with the
cerebral—is entirely wasted by this talky bore of a script.
There’s no wit here, nor are there any compelling reasons to read the
thing. The collaborators—especially Haspiel—would be well
advised to stick to their solo work.

Edited by Lynda Barry

(Houghton Mifflin) $22.

The shocking thing about last year’s Chris Ware–edited Best
American Comics 2007 anthology was that it was bad. Ware, who had
already edited one phenomenal comics anthology with McSweeney’s
Issue 13, turned in a collection of weird, abstract stories that
didn’t come anywhere near representing the best comics made last year.
Critics speculated that the formalist Ware was overrepresenting the
other end of the artistic spectrum for fear of being proclaimed
biased.

Thankfully, Lynda Barry doesn’t seem to have any such fears. Her
selections—fiction and nonfiction from sources as varied as the
New Yorker to handmade minicomics—are only alike in that
they’re each completely different from the other. Evan Larson tells a
cartoony story about Cupid taking a holiday, Sarah Oleksyk shares a
relationship she developed with a junkie who frequented her all-night
copy shop, David Axe and Steve Olexa relay the terror of being an
embedded reporter in Iraq.

Even the failures are interesting: An extended story by Lilli
Carré called “The Thing About Madeline” is about a woman living
a mundane life who is suddenly replaced by a doppelgänger. The
story goes nowhere, and it doesn’t find any new purchase on this
well-traveled ground, but the impressionistic whorls and blue palette
of the art make the aimless voyage a beautiful one. In the
introduction, Barry explains the proper way to read comics: “For best
results, it is good to read something twice so you can misunderstand it
at least once.” All of these stories can be enriched by rereading, and
even the least exciting of them deserve that level of inspection.
Thanks to Barry, future editors finally have a good example of what the
Best American Comics series should look like.

by Jonathan Hennessey and
Aaron McConnell

(Hill and Wang) $35.

by David Rees

(Soft Skull Press) $15.95.

One good, weirdly specific rule of thumb for comics creators: You
can’t fit more than 37 words into any given comic-book panel. Even one
word more makes the panel look like a block of text with a tiny,
unnecessary drawing crammed in.

The creators of the graphic-novel adaptation of the U.S.
Constitution never heard this rule. Text is everywhere: great big
imposing curtains of it, on every single page. The art, when you can
see it through the holes in the dense script, is muddy and brown and
flat. In addition, the book doesn’t even come with a copy of the full
text of the Constitution, forcing the reader to simply trust the
author’s interpretation. There’s simply no reason for this book to
exist, besides as a kind of Chick-tract porn for government wonks and
Ron Paul fanatics.

Readers who are interested in learning about rights guaranteed in
the Constitution (and their recent snuffing) are instead directed to
the collection of the first seven years of Get Your War On,
David Rees’s weekly clip-art letters of outrage to the citizens of
America. Singly, the cartoon has never done much for me, but it
functions as a powerful indictment of the Bush administration when
compiled into one giant omnibus. As an added bonus, a reader could keep
a running, dated tally of civil liberties that have died in the days
since September 11 in the margins of each page. The funny thing about
GYWO is that, since the characters are all clip-art office
drones, normal cartooning concerns, like plot and character
development, simply don’t apply, making the strip more like a series of
one-liners. This enables Rees to break the 37-words-per-panel rule with
impunity, and his fist-shaking anger still makes you care. It is the
exception that proves the rule.