| June
2008 |
Damian Duffy & John Jennings, The Hole: Consumer Culture, Volume 1 (Front Forty Press, 2008); $30.00, hardcover.
To say that The
Hole is ambitious
is the understatement of the year. It strives to be nothing
less than a Waste
Land for the
graphic novel renaissance, and it shares with Eliot’s
modernist manifesto a decidedly bleak (but by no means
entirely hopeless) view of the world we have inherited. It
also shares with The Waste Land
a serious level of
difficulty, and most readers looking for a quick skim are
going to be frustrated by what they find here: a narrative
that plays with time like an accordion, an unresolved
conclusion that is simultaneously hopeful and apocalyptic,
allusions and references to religious and mythological
figures that are at times opaque and even willfully
obscure, and a deep disdain (one worthy of Eliot himself)
for modern consumer culture that is likely to leave few
readers feeling completely smug or innocent. But this is
also, as they define the book, a scifi/horror comic, and
Duffy and Jennings never lose sight of the generic
pleasures and conventions of their chosen media. Like
Eliot, or (a more satisfying example, since Eliot was
ultimately a big prig) like a hip hop artist, it is what we
choose to build (as artists, as readers) from the festering
fragments of our modern world that matters.
As the allusion to The Waste Land
probably suggests, much won’t
make sense the first time through, and Duffy and Jennings
are clearly counting on readers patient and committed
enough to work it through in steady loops. For example,
early in the book, a still unnamed protagonist (Curtis) is
confronted by an armed thug demanding his money. He
fantasizes about beating the thief down but then flashes on
a memory of another act of violence, which only later do we
realize is a memory of him beating up a woman while stoned
on heroin. He makes the decision not to fight back, and we
see a woman beaming at him from behind, a woman we will
only much later realize is the younger version of his
mother. Confused? You will be, but most of the time you
won’t mind, because the energy and smarts of the book will
leave you confident that it all connects if only you are
willing to do the work to put the pieces back together.
The book bounces back and forward in time--sometimes with
clear markers, sometimes not. Early in the book, a narrator
asks us if the “time stamps [are] helping, or have I lost
you yet?” Making matters still more fraught, this narrator
turns out to be a most unreliable manifestation of Legba,
an already difficult and contradictory African deity who
came to the New World through the horrors of the Middle
Passage centuries ago. Legba is by definition a paradoxical
deity--as Dana Rush tells us in the introductory essay,
“simultaneously young and old, constructive and
destructive, wise and wanton.” The problem here is that
Legba’s contradictions seem to have splintered off from
themselves, the wise Old Man at the crossroads no longer
able to check and balance the wanton and voracious young
man of appetite and ambition.
The reasons are spelled out (perhaps a bit heavy-handedly)
in the subtitle: “Consumer Culture.” The very balance of
nature is out of alignment in a world of instant
gratification and the endless exploitation of African
culture that must nourish Legba for future generations.
Here Legba and black culture in general are emptied of
meaning, tossed around as marketing devices or consumer
products. And these conditions have allowed Legba’s
appetitive manifestation not only to “outgrow” him, but to
leave him entirely--to become something completely new: a
sun-glass wearing whiteboy with a copyright symbol for a
third eye. As Papa Legba warns, the very fate of the world
is now a terrifying thing to behold.
The one ray of hope in the book is the hair salon and
tattoo parlor, Faded Ink, owned by Curtis’s mother. Here we
see a local black-owned business where craft is celebrated,
where open political discourse runs free (and loud), and
where people still talk to each other as human beings. Here
in the tattoo parlor, instead of being consumed by popular
culture, popular culture is itself consumed, reworked,
remade in the fleshy, living art of tattoos. This is placed
in direct opposition to Carla Bonté’s voodo emporium, where
Afro-Caribbean culture is packaged and sold, and where the
darkest most irrational manifestations of Legba are
nourished on greed and jealousy. In fact, in this world old
man Papa Legba is all-but homeless: the only interior space
we see him settling down to a meal is the salon, a sign
that it is spaces like this that we need if the Greed and
Violence of Legba’s natures are to be balanced again by his
wisdom and vision.
Aspects of this book reminded me of Gaiman’s
American
Gods, especially
the vision of the new gods of commerce and technology
threatening to usurp the place of the neglected traditional
gods of the Old World. And as with American Gods, some of the satire of consumer culture
comes off a bit already-dated, as all such references do.
It is, after all, part of the power of capitalism to have
always already neutralized in apathy and irony any
potential critique. As our narrator (who markets himself as
an action figure named “White Peter”) says, “The revolution
will be televised… It’ll be a low rated midseason
replacement, cancelled after two episodes.” But even as the
parodies of violent video games, reality TV, and animations
designed to teach young girls how to become “super sparkly”
shoppers seem at times a bit easy, Duffy and Jennings get
them just right, touching on them just long enough to
lighten the tone and underscore some larger arguments in a
book that increasingly tends (again, like Eliot’s
masterpiece) toward the abstract and metaphysical.
The second half of the book is where the going gets really
weird. Our two wayward youth, Trina (daughter of voodoo
entrepreneur, Carla) and Curtis come together, literally,
as a hole in Curtis’s midriff opens up and devours her
while she is in the act of, um, consuming him. Together the
two forge some less-than-perfect union, and this is when
things get especially hard to follow. As a monstrous
superpowered freak, Carla/Curtis takes on the dark agent in
an old-fashioned superhero battle…. And that is where our
capacity for plot summary gives out. But I’m happy to go
along for the psychedelic ride. Jennings’ dazzling layouts,
which are mind-bending throughout, really take off in the
book’s final pages, and it is a huge (and deliberate)
letdown when our narrator takes over again with promises of
a sequel whose preview is deliberately illustrated in a
much more restrained style, santized for your easy
consumption. But that is the story our far-from-trustworthy
narrator would tell, and I am confident that the sequel we
do get will resist him every step of the way.
Of course, there is a painful irony here.
The Hole: Consumer
Culture leaves
much unresolved and unanswered: how will Papa Legba defeat
his evil former-twin? What will become of Curtis and Trina
and the new creation they have melded into? What will
become of Carla and the Fate of the World? Since a fair
amount hangs in the balance, I am eager for the answers,
but I know that the sequel depends in great measure on
precisely the consumer culture the book decries at every
turn. Published by a small boutique press and distributed
by an academic publisher, this beautiful, challenging,
mind-altering book is going to be a tough sell to comic
stores and mainstream bookstores alike. And without sales,
will we get our sequel? That is, without consumer culture,
can we restore the balance to the world that consumer
culture has shattered? The answer for Duffy and Jennings
clearly lies in the model of Faded Ink, the family-owned,
community-centered, craft-based space where exchange is
inspired by art, love and politics. This is the kind of
exchange of both capital and ideas that they wish to create
with this book (and it is one that they have been carefully
nourishing for some time at their small collective, Eye
Trauma Comix).
So you heard it here first, folks. The Fate of the World
hangs in the balance. Buy this book, read this book, and
then read it again. You will be richer for it, as will all
of us. Now, on with the crazy-ass show!
