Jamie Tanner, The Aviary (AdHouse Books, 2007). $12.95, paperback.

by Jared Gardner

One of my ongoing jeremiads over the months has been a growing sense of boredom with the lack of imagination on the part of some remarkably talented younger comics creators. Endless coming-of-age stories, tales of troubled childhoods and dysfunctional families – the graphic novel has come to resemble more and more the tedium of the contemporary novel in the age of cookie-cutter writing programs. James Tanner’s The Aviary is a reminder of all the reasons why comics can and should do so much more. A delirious collection of loosely interconnected stories, The Aviary is perhaps the most compelling and challenging book I’ve read this year, and yet, even after several readings, I don’t feel entirely ready to begin describing  its workings or its effects.

At the most basic, The Aviary collects the stories of a series of inventors, manufacturers, pornographic artistes, compulsive repressives, and amputees and the fetishists who love them (and dismember them). A first read leaves you struggling after the connecting thread to pull it all together; a second read pulls apart the narrative threads you thought you had found and suggests some other – more gestural – connections in their place. All of which makes you want to read the book yet again. The pieces explore the delicate and deadly bonds between desire and repression, between consuming and consumption, love and murder, humor and violence. By the end something resembling a vast surrealist conspiracy begins to take shape. But like the best conspiracies, the fun lies in the hypotheses and theories and not in any definitive mappings or final solutions. The details – the pins on the map – are left to the individual readers to provide.

Part of the pleasure of the book lies in the gaps – the answers not provided – best epitomized by the central recurring figure of the Quiet Bird Man whose mute blinks and gentle Mona Lisa smile serves as his only answer to the many questions he receives from those he encounters. The blinks of his eyes are perhaps a perfect description of sequential graphic narrative, the blank spaces between his blinks representing the literal and interpretive space between the panels (and between the characters that populate the world of The Aviary).

The Aviary will remind some readers of Ben Katchor’s Jew of New York. Like Katchor, Tanner demonstrates an obsessive interest in the products, advertisements, services and clippings that litter our modern lives, and he similarly imagines a loosely confederated world of visionaries and perverse artists and entrepreneurs. Unlike Katchor’s gray washes, however, Tanner’s lines are cross-etched in sharp pen and ink, and the art as a whole seems to create the impression simultaneously of modernist woodcuttings and 19th-century newsprint. But perhaps the clearest analog for Tanner’s vision is found not in comics or literature, but in films of Peter Greenaway and his surreal love poems to fetishists of all stripes. Reading The Aviary, one cannot help but feel that Greenaway’s vision might well find its ideal medium in comics. And certainly comics would be well-served to put down tales of adolescent angst and make more room for exploring the kinds of improbable connections that often derail other narrative mediums but which only open comics up to new depths of meaning and possibilities.