THAT’S RIGHT, I SAID COMICS – Issue #5.
|
|
Location
St. Mark's Comics
148 Montague Street
Brooklyn, NYUnited States
I recently picked up a graphic novel with this on the masthead: Bob Fingerman’s FROM THE ASHES [A Speculative Memoir]. This titling gives you a whole bunch of great information:
1) It’s the latest release from New York “underground” cartoonist Bob Fingerman, whose work I remember all the way back to Cracked Magazine, but who in fact has been turning out splendidly insane, occasionally perverted, graphically irresistible comics work for a couple of decades. (I have collections of his sci-fi series White Like She and the autobiographical Minimum Wage, which I will re-read and spotlight in this column, somewhere down the road.) As far as non-mainstream cartoonists go, Fingerman is more accessible and enjoyable than most. And funnier. Much, much funnier.
2) From The Ashes, the book's title, means that this is a story of post-apocalyptic times, picking up right after something massive has destroyed civilization as we know it. The story picks up directly afterwards.
3) The subtitle A Speculative Memoir means that From The Ashes is an imagined extrapolation of how Bob Fingerman and his real-life wife, Michele, would react and proceed if they found themselves standing in post-apocalyptic rubble. This book knocks the all-too-common sub-genre of graphic memoirs on its ass, as Fingerman proves once and for all that truth may be stranger than fiction, but imagined truth is stranger still.
From The Ashes is set on September 17th, 2008 and is very much a product of that time. (There are very brief cameos from famous faces such as Anthony Bourdain and Stephen Colbert.) Fingerman is pretty up-front about his personal politics in this story; he’s a belligerent cynic and furious liberal, along the lines of comedians Patton Oswalt and David Cross. If you agree with what those guys say, you’ll probably find plenty to like in this book. If you don’t agree with that way of thinking but you’re open-minded enough to be entertained by differing points of view, you’ll still be able to enjoy it. If you look at FOX News as gospel, you probably don’t read comics anyway, so I don’t have to warn you away. Smartly, Fingerman never has his characters discover the cause of the apocalypse – a couple theories are bandied about during the story, but no conclusive answers are ever found. That way, he doesn’t politicize the apocalypse itself, only its aftermath, and as in real life, there are lunatics on both sides of the aisle.
Bob and Michele don’t know why the world has been destroyed, and at first they don’t seem to care. In the story’s first great joke, they actually feel liberated by the freedom that being the only two people on earth [so they think] seems to provide. I definitely related to this idea – Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend is among my favorite books of all time, and I think it’s because part of me (the part that has tendencies towards claustrophobia) interprets the concept of being the last man on earth as a dream rather than a nightmare. Fingerman gets all of the hallmark end-of-the-world references, like I Am Legend and The Road Warrior and that great Burgess Meredith episode of The Twilight Zone, and his characters freely namedrop the geneology of apocalyptic literature and cinema.
Not to spoil anything, but Bob and Michele aren’t alone. There are cannibals, and zombies, and irradiated mutants, and scariest of all, religious kooks and a band of clones of wee Karl Rove. There’s also a giant floating cyborg head of FOX News pundit Bill O’Reilly that honestly, is what pushed me over the edge to buy the $20 book. (I don’t get this stuff sent to me for free yet – hint, hint…) The O’Reilly character is an amazing touch – it’s both a take-off on the freakish Marvel Comics character M.O.D.O.K. and a showcase for Fingerman’s brilliant skill at caricature. Whether you like O'Reilly or not, it's just a funny drawing. None of these new characters are what Bob and Michele (and the reader) expect them to be at first, and every one of them has a unique look and a unique personality, while never losing their power as a source of anything-goes comedy. The best characters are probably the band of mutant freaks, because the cartoonist’s joy in drawing them is totally transparent. The girl at the register when I bought the book commented on this when she noted that “Bob Fingerman really loves to draw tentacles.” He totally does! As a sometime cartoonist myself, I told her that sometimes you just find imagery that captivates you, that you keep returning to, and you can’t necessarily explain why. For me, it's werewolves and skeletons. For Bob Fingerman, it's tentacles. Who can explain it? That’s one for the head-shrinkers.
I usually let books sit on my nighttable until I can get to them, but I tore into From The Ashes on the subway heading home from the store, and read it all in the span of the day. It’s not perfect (the characters are a little too self-aware and steeped in the same pop-culture references than I usually like to see), but it’s a blast to read, and the artwork is pretty remarkable in a bound-to-be underrated kind of way. Fingerman has a wonderful focus on detail – his every background character has as much personality and distinct body language as the leads. His characters all have energy to spare, and as previously mentioned, he’s an ace caricaturist. In the foreword, comedian Marc Maron likens Fingerman to the great MAD cartoonists. He cites Jack Davis, but I see plenty of Harvey Kurtzman in there too. (Gigantic compliment.) The color scheme of From The Ashes is equally smart and memorable. Fingerman uses brown tones for the majority of the book, to cast the post-apocalyptic setting in its dullest light, but switches to grey tones for flashbacks and blue tones for a story location not to be disclosed here, and even a full-color page for one brief scene. I can’t quite tell what medium he was working in for this book. It doesn’t really look like computer coloring. It looks almost like colored pencil – in some places, even crayon! I have this faint hope that someone will forward Bob Fingerman this rave review and he’ll write me to let me know what kind of equipment he used on From The Ashes, since I can’t seem to dig up that definitive information anywhere.
From The Ashes is now available in a beautiful collected edition from IDW. Really do consider checking it out. If nothing else, the “speculative memoir” is a great idea that deserves to catch on. The comic itself is a fun, breezy, likable, scarily on-point, and somehow hopeful chunk of well-crafted cartooning. I totally dug it.
