Lethem and Satrapi

This post is dedicated to Brian Warmoth.

The New York Review of Books is one of the best publications around. It's kind of like The Comics Journal for other stuff. Yet, in their April 7 issue, there appears to be some conflicting articles about comic books.

First, there's John Leonard's overview of the writings of Jonathan Lethem. It's fairly respectful of his writings, but he doesn't seem to care much for the reverence that Lethem shows for comic books and other aspects of pop culture.

Do we care that Lethem saw John Ford's The Searchers twelve times and Star Wars twenty-one, or that his "fever for authenticity" led him to Anthony Newley, or that he still believes the Fantastic Four superheroes were the Rubber Soul and the White Album of comics? (Do you care how many times I have seen The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, or what's going on in my head while I watch Sara Evans sing "Suds in the Bucket" on the country music cable channel?) Is it so unreasonable to want to know more of what he thinks about Julio Cortázar and less of how he feels about Obi-Wan Kenobi? To wish for a few words explaining why he stopped reading Don DeLillo, rather than thousands more on Red Sonja, Howard the Duck, and Marvel's "existential loners"?

Just to make his point more clear, Leonard adds this quip towards his conclusion:

And I am sorry that none of us can fly, besides which we're opaque. But it is time this gifted writer closed his comic books for good. Superpowers are not what magic realism was about in Bulgakov, Kobo Abe, Salman Rushdie, or the Latin American flying carpets. That Michael Chabon and Paul Auster have gone graphic, that one Jonathan, Lethem, writes on and on about John Ford, while another Jonathan, Franzen, writes on and on about "Peanuts," even as Rick Moody confides to the Times Book Review that "comics are currently better at the sociology of the intimate gesture than literary fiction is," may just mean that the slick magazines with the scratch and sniff ads for vodka and opium are willing to pay a bundle for bombast about ephemera.

Well, I care about what Lethem has to say about the impact that comic books had on his life and writing. This isn't the same as equating all comics with works of great literature, but rather it's an exploration of the things that have made us who we are. Its one thing to praise writers like Don Delillo, but another to pretend that that's all that you ever read. Why make-believe that the only books we read are the classics? If comics were one of the things that made you interested in Literature, why pretend otherwise? If they provide the inspiration to create greater works of fiction, isn't that a good thing?

On a more positive note, Patrice Storace gives an very nice review of Persepolis Volumes 1 & 2 by Marjane Satrapi. It includes this insight:

That Persepolis 1, a book in which it is almost impossible to find an image distinguished enough to consider an independent piece of visual art, and equally difficult to find a sentence which in itself surpasses the serviceable, emerges as a work so fresh, absorbing, and memorable is an extraordinary achievement.

I really need to read Volume 2.

Edit: I really have to point out this hilarious strip by Patricia Storms that was partly inspired by the same John Leonard article. Thank-you Tom Spurgeon