| June
2008 |
Elijah J. Brubaker, Reich #1-4 (Sparkplug, 2007-), $3.00, quartlerly.
I’ll admit right up front that I love biographies, and I
love biographical comics (a good deal more, on average,
than I enjoy many autobiographical comics). I adore Rick
Geary’s Victorian Crime biographies (and his most recent
comics biography of J. Edgar Hoover, which I would also
review this issue if I had more time), and Chester
Brown’s Louis
Riel is one of my
favorite books of all time. The sad thing is that there are
far more autobiographical comics than biographical ones,
and not all the biographies measure up to the ideal set by
Geary and Brown (see, for example, Lutes and
Bertozzi’s Houdini). Reich expresses its debt to Brown’s
Louis Riel
from the start in its system
of endnotes for this ongoing biography of the badboy
pioneer of modern psychology. And four issues in, it is
clear he will soon be sitting on my shelf right next to
Brown as a model for what can be done with this form in
bringing to life the public and secret lives of the
forgotten or misunderstood men and women of the past.
If you are like me, what little you know about Wilhelm
Reich could fit on a postage stamp: student of Freud, sex
addict, guru to the free love movement and godfather to
freethinkers of the 1960s. All of which is true, as
Brubaker tells it. But this is also a man of intense
brilliance and passions, a deeply ambitious man who made
enemies among his psychiatric colleagues right and left
(often by offering to sleep with their wives) and a
visionary man who might well have found the wrong outlet
for his most powerful insights. Indeed, reading the first
few issues, one cannot help but wonder what Reich would
have been like had he devoted himself instead to art. What
would he have produced?
As it was, he ended up focusing his considerable energies
and seemingly dauntless courage in the still fledgling
world of professional psychiatry, a world, like all
professions, of jealousies, provincialisms, and rigid
hierarchies (although Reich arrived early enough to find
fewer of the latter than his descendants would). And into
this world, Reich sought to bring together his two great
passions, sex and revolution, arguing for the reformation
of the conditions of labor through a reformation of the
conditions of sex—and particularly the condition of the
average orgasm, which Reich was convinced was tragically
lacking. Fix one, Reich believed, and you could fix the
other and remake the world.
Of course, Marxists had little interest in psychology, and
the psychiatric establishment has less interest in
politics, so Reich was in many ways a doomed prophet from
the start. But Brubaker is ultimately not interested in
defending Reich’s theories and even less interested in
turning him into a martyr. Instead, Brubaker seeks to put
Reich himself on the graphic couch, to get at his childhood
traumas, his deep personal and professional contradictions
(his deep love of the People and his complete inability to
connect to those immediately around him, for example), the
beauty of his highest visions and the ugliness of his
grossest personal mistakes. And he does so with an economy
and precision that is a wonder to behold. Reich turns out
to be a remarkably human bundle of contradictions who just
happened to be a misunderstood genius—or a misunderstood
genius who was ultimately defeated by the fact that he just
happened to be way too much like the rest of us.
I had not seen much of Brubaker’s work previously to
picking up an issue of Reich, but I am a committed follower now.
Working with outsized heads and compressed bodies that at
first seem to suggest a much more lighthearted subject
matter than we in fact have before us, Brubaker makes his
characters come alive with completely believable and
transparent personalities in only a few panels. Reich
himself is alternately brooding and open. The regularity of
the panels that divide up his pages is in fact the only
visual constant in this book, as spaces warp and
perspectives shift with each panel, making us feel at times
as if we are in a fun house (which in fact we are). There
is much in the style he uses here to remind one of David
B.’S work in Epileptic, and like that work Brubaker allows
dreams and monsters to fully occupy the diegetic space of
this rigorously researched historical narrative. And his
expressive simplicity owes a good deal to Chester Brown as
well. But ultimately, the style feels very much Brubaker’s
own, and it feels just right for the strange combination of
shadow and sunshine that makes up his subject.
There is still much to come in the story of Reich’s life,
just as clearly there is much great work ahead for
Brubaker. And Sparkplug, his Portland-based publisher,
continues to demonstrate rare consistency in both vision
and taste in their choice of projects, making it one of the
most exciting comics companies operating in the U.S.
today. Reich is one to follow closely for the next
year or two as Brubaker finishes this important
work. Reich is also clearly one for the ages.
