An anonymous coward writes:

"Comics Grow Up (Again):

World War 3 Chips Three Off the Old Block"

Paul Buhle

The Metamorphosis

By Peter Kuper

Crown, 79 pages, $18.00

Johnny Jihad: A Graphic Novel

By Ryan Inzana

NBM, 92 pages, $9.95

Portraits of Israelis & Palestinians (for My Parents)

By Seth Tobocman

Soft Skull Press, 120 pages, $15.95

We seem to be in the midst of a comics revival that comes, unanticipated and unbidden, from several quarters at once. Consider, for instance: On the heels of familiar Marvel figures at the megaplex, American Splendor serves up the art-house version, with Harvey Pekar as the Spider-Man of the smallish screen (and apparently on its way to Oscar nominations). Consider, at the literary highbrow level, the almost embarrassed miniburst of attention to assorted graphic-story hardbacks and their artists by the New York Times and New York Review of Books during the last 18 months or so, after an indifference decades in the making. And consider the current output.Veteran comics readers will recall that we've been here before. Back in the 90s, Art Spiegelman's Maus was a smash at MOMA, Harvey Pekar was a Letterman regular and Ben Katchor transmogrified briefly into a radio dramatist of NPR. Then the public attention faded, along with the recent memories of the underground comics that had set these notable artists in motion. Even Bill Griffith's Zippy the Pinhead has been seen to yearn, after 9/11, for bygone days. What we have now is the mature art of newer generations, alternatively serious and funny, heavily talented in styles set in more classic (rather than "comic") graphics traditions.

World War 3 Illustrated is the venue of common contact, in some ways a sort of The Masses magazine of the 1910s updated for almost five generations hence. The Masses gave us Ashcan art, vernacular cartoons defending the mass strikes of immigrants and the Madison Square Garden pageant of the Industrial Workers of the World. It also dramatized free love and birth control in quaint Greenwich Village. (The Village looked so unbelievably exciting to The Masses readers that, along with the opening of the Sheridan Square stop, its images may actually have driven up rents.) The radicals have seen nothing like this marriage of politics and culture since; neither has American art.

But, of course, The Masses (1911-17) had only a few years to make history and get itself suppressed for opposing the first World War. World War 3 has been around since 1980, until recently mostly seen and sold on the Lower East Side. Its founding spirits, with the exception of Eric Drooker, were not born New Yorkers (neither, for that matter, were most of the The Masses artists), but Clevelanders Seth Tobocman and Peter Kuper, teenagers encouraged by Pekar and his pal Robert Crumb.

The artists of WW3 express no uniform style, but most notably have revived the woodcut legacy of Frans Masereel and the forgotten New York artist Lynd Ward. The woodcut (simulated in later generations with scratchboard, scraping designs on clay or by pen and ink on acrylic, Tobocman's chosen medium) was perfectly suited in all its starkness for the multiple tragedies of modern life, the artist seeking to describe a world of war and suffering, himself finally alone in his pyrrhic quest for a redemptive vision. Masereel's focus on the metropolis has likewise stayed with his successors, the giant buildings and their shadows miniaturizing the human inhabitants.

But if World War 3 Illustrated has usually been short on cheer, it has not lacked humor, with Kuper its painfully comic avatar. (He took over Mad's "Spy vs. Spy" a few years ago.) Shifting nimbly from comic style to style, he often eloquently portrays the little man in the overpowering city.

Kafka is a favorite Kuper subject, and The Metamorphosis follows the 1995 volume Give It Up! that sought to blend early 20th-century Euro-alienation with late 20th-century Americo-alienation (the artist's own). It was unfortunate that Introducing Kafka, with drawings by Crumb, had appeared two years earlier. Crumb's Kafka was really Crumb, amazingly Jewish, dominated by a tyrannical father (like the artist himself in childhood), later adrift in life but craving sex from notably Jewish women, like the artist himself. It was a Kafka-esque tour de force.

Kuper's Give It Up! may have suffered from comparisons, but not The Metamorphosis, which gives itself over entirely to rendering the original storyline. Only small chunks of Kafka's text are reproduced here, but they are quite enough, set against the images of the hapless traveling salesman Gregor Samsa become the pitiful insect that, metaphorically, he had always been. As is well-known, his trauma traumatizes the family, and only his demise sets free the once-loving sister whom he'd hoped, on his savings, to send to the music conservatory.

The Metamorphosis is an accomplished and much-polished effort, while Seth Tobocman's Portraits of Israelis and Palestinians has rigorously retained its sketchbook quality. These are drawings taken on the street, on the bus, in meetings with ordinary folks in the Jewish state and the West Bank that he approached, as he says, without fear and notably without prejudgments. They look out at us from the pages, innocents all, tied in various ways from their clothing and their experiences to American culture, the connections that bring them into conversation with the artist. What Tobocman is trying to accomplish in this little book is a big thing: to get ordinary Americans (but perhaps especially Jews), starting with his own parents, to look at these people with fresh eyes. They are all Semites, after all, not two sub-species of human beings; neither can suffer without the other suffering.

Ryan Inzana, 20 years younger, is a Trenton homeboy whose drawings have been appearing lately in the Nation, Boston Globe, Slate, and even the Wall Street Journal along with WW3. Johnny Jihad, his first book, owes a lot to Masereel and Ward, but (like Tobocman's Portraits) also something to Joe Sacco's visual journey through the Middle East. Tackling perhaps the most controversial subject possible, Inzana brings it all back to the lives of the alienated teenagers who, with a little perverse encouragement, could become a John Walker Lindh.

You might ask, what in the world might make a disciplined jihadist out of a glue-sniffing grocery-store clerk in Jersey? Some sense of purpose, where none had been; something like family where family had failed; some adventurous quest in an otherwise apparently purposeless existence. John Sendel, our homegrown terrorist, is not all that different from his peers. He is just dumb enough to get religion (fundamentalist Islam) in a great big poisonous dose and go into secret training, then embark on what looks like a suicide mission. How he actually gets to Afghanistan, working for the CIA yet, is less interesting than what he finds there: a nightmare of a different kind, or perhaps the real-life shadow of his nihilistic teenage visions.

Inzana draws no moral; or rather, he leaves it to us. We didn't cause it all, but collectively speaking, we aren't innocent, either. Now, Inzana suggests, it engulfs us. Unless we can learn.

New York Press, Volume 16, Issue 48