Review of Stuck Rubber Baby

 https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/stuck-rubber-baby-coming-age-jim-crow-south

Fun Home (A Family Tragicomic) - Alison Bechdel, 2006

Fun Home is Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir of growing up with her emotionally distant and closeted gay father, Bruce.

The memoir is set partly in rural Pennsylvania, through the 1960s to the 1980s. Bruce is an army veteran obsessed with literature, antiques and heritage restoration of the family home.

His problematic attraction to teenage boys is eventually exposed through the legal system, leading to his suicide at the same time Alison is coming out as a lesbian.

Fun Home refers to the family’s funeral home business. Being from a small town, Bruce is also an English teacher at the local high school. In an Addams Family-esque way, they develop a cavalier attitude to death.

As Alison grows up, she comes to share Bruce’s love of literature: Albert Camus, Greek myths, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, F Scott Fitzgerald and Proust, among others.

Bechdel’s gentle, bluish, two-tone artwork serves to soften the emotionally-scarring events of her life. The position of an eyelid, a dot for a mouth or the slightest extra line on Bruce’s face is enough to convey the right emotional reaction. Alison’s acts of self-pleasure and lesbian encounters are treated in an understated way.

Occasional family trips to bohemian New York reveal another side of her parents’ former lives to Alison — versions of themselves they jettisoned in order to “fit in”. I wondered whether, in a more accepting society, Bruce might not have killed himself. Through her reflections, Alison comes to understand the hidden ways through which her father expressed his love for her.

Bechdel is also known for her influential comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which ran from 1983 to 2008, and is the source of the “Bechdel Test” — a measure of the representation of women in fiction.

The test asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. It should come as no surprise that a high proportion of films, TV shows, books and other media fail the test. There is a distinct lack of gender diversity in the industry.

Fun Home has been adapted into an award-winning Broadway musical and actor/producer Jake Gyllenhaal is planning to produce a movie-version of the memoir.

(Published in Green Left Weekly here.)

V for Vendetta - Alan Moore, 1982-1989

V for Vendetta holds the distinction of so far being the only graphic novel to have a direct influence on a political movement. The stylized Guy Fawkes mask of the lead character was first worn by members of the hacker-activist group Anonymous in 2008 during a protest against the Church of Scientology, but have since spread throughout the global protest movement.

English comics author Alan Moore started writing V for Vendetta in the early 1980's as a reaction to the rise of Thatcher and Reagan, and his fears of the growing far-right National Front. Set in a near future after a nuclear war that has left most of the world in tatters, the UK has escaped the bombs but has fallen under fascist control by the racist and homophobic 'Norsefire' party.

Enter 'V', an unhinged masked anarchist bomber intent on revenge and the establishment of a land of "Do-as-You-Please". V starts by rescuing a young woman Evey about to be raped by a gang of secret police, then proceeds to bomb the Houses of Parliament. The sexual identity of V is ambiguous and as the back story is revealed it turns out he/she was imprisoned at a concentration camp and subjected to cruel scientific experiments. V's methodical attacks eventually target the regime's leader, Adam Susan, who obsesses constantly over the all-seeing central computer that analyses a massive network of surveillance cameras.

David Lloyd's chiaroscuro and cinematic artwork is dense with information that is as much a part of the story as Alan Moore's text, rich with literary associations. The morality of V's actions are open to interpretation. Moore was starting to critique the traditional vigilante comic book superhero that so often serves to police a conservative status quo, a theme he would continue in his magnum opus, Watchmen. These works lent the American comics business an intellectual credibility that led to wider readership and increased use of the term 'graphic novel', although Moore just sees it as a marketing ploy.

Many of V for Vendetta's dark visions have proved prescient - pervasive state surveillance, big data and the rise of the far right. In October 2010, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange wore a Guy Fawkes mask at an Occupy London protest before making a speech. A month later a warrant was out for his arrest. Clearly comics have the power to ask big political questions and sometimes even inspire people to action.

Persepolis (The Story of a Childhood) - Marjane Satrapi, 2000

Persepolis is an autobiographical graphic novel detailing the childhood of a young girl growing up in Tehran during the period of the Islamic revolution. 'Marji' is the headstrong only child of middle class parents of Marxist persuasion and who fought against the monarchy of the Shah.

The book begins with a short summary of Persian history, including the CIA organised coup of 1953, which ousted Prime Minister Mossadeq after his government nationalised the oil industry. Daily events in Satrapi's life included attending protests that would often end in violence, arrest and release of family friends from jail and state-sanctioned whippings. The revolution takes a fundamentalist turn and reluctantly she starts wearing a veil. The Shah is ousted but the situation becomes more dangerous for her family as Iraq invades Iran, supported by the western powers.

Marji's experiences feed her growing political awareness, supplemented by her voracious appetite for reading about Palestine, Cuba, Vietnam and Marxism. Her uncle Anoosh, a communist revolutionary, is arrested, accused for being a spy and ultimately executed for his beliefs. Marji's family begins to worry about her safety and decides to send her to Austria where volume 1 ends. Volume 2 covers here subsequent life in Vienna and then later back in Iran.

Persepolis' direct and emotional black and white drawings both humanise and universalise the events of Iran's recent history. Originally published in French, the largest comics market in the world, it has sold millions of copies, translated into over 10 languages and was made into a film in 2007. It has become a popular text in US middle and high school classrooms, challenging Iranian stereotypes and helping American students understand the west's legacy of imperialism in the middle-east. This in turn has led to calls for it to be banned in some school districts, which have been successfully resisted by supporters.

War in the Neighbourhood (a story of people in struggle) - Seth Tobocman, 1999

New York's Lower East Side has had a long association with radical politics of anarchist, socialist or communist persuasions. By the late 70's up to 80% of the area's housing was abandoned and a squatter movement developed amid gentrification and a growing arts scene. Seth Tobocman's War in the Neighbourhood chronicles a period of intense activism and personal struggle of many of the squatters through the Reagan era up to the Mayoralty of Rudy Giuliani.

The New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) was set up in 1978, and took ownership of many LES buildings, ostensibly to turn them into 'affordable housing'. Tobocman recounts how ultimately yuppies started moving in and the poor were evicted. The acronym came to mean instead Housing Prevention and Destruction for those opposed to the process.

Battles raged for the rights of the homeless, the right to walk a dog at night in the local park, to not be attacked by police and to not have the abandoned building you called home be demolished. There are also deeply personal stories with people of many different backgrounds forced together out of the shared need for housing. Problems of drugs, HIV, racial bias, police violence and domestic violence abound. The lyrics of Grandmaster Flash's 'The Message' come to mind: "Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice."

Tobocman's style is bold high contrast black and white. What it lacks in detail it makes up for in expressiveness. The text is often written over the surfaces of walls, doors, stairs and furniture, as though the locations themselves hold the memories of the events that occurred there. A strong theme throughout is the difficulty in keeping the peace between different personalities and factions while staying true to one's principles. The road to democracy and true community is through struggle against oppression, to learn from one's mistakes and to also know ourselves.

Tobocman is also the co-founder of comics anthology magazine World War Three Illustrated. Collectively run since 1979, and continuing to this day, it features artists with a left-wing focus covering issues such as housing rights, feminism, the environment, religion, police brutality, globalization, and global conflict zones.

I Saw It (The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima) - Keiji Nakazawa, 1972

Keiji Nakazawa was just 6 years old when the atomic bomb struck his hometown of Hiroshima. By sheer luck he survived but his father and two siblings were killed, pinned under their collapsed home and unable to be freed before fire destroyed everything. His mother, pregnant at the time, in shock, gave birth, but the baby died due to complications only a few months later.

'I Saw It', later expanded into the 'Barefoot Gen' series, is sometimes credited as the first example of comics used to document factual events that went on to influence works such as Art Spiegelman's Maus. This first-person account of the events from August 6th 1945 onward is utterly unforgettable. Nakazawa's images use the comics medium to convey the internal and external horror in a way that photography cannot.

Nakazawa's father was an artist and craftsman opposed to Japan's imperial system, known for his left-wing and anti-war views. As a young boy Keiji was dimly aware of his father's views, but growing up in the grinding poverty and struggle of post-atomic Hiroshima, his perspective matured and he became determined to make a living as a cartoonist and use his skills and experience to warn the world of the horrors of nuclear war.

Keiji's first experience of comics was in 1947, reading Osamu Tezuka's 'New Treasure Island', the first ever hit full-length graphic novel. Tezuka would soon go on to his greatest success with Astro Boy ('Mighty Atom' in Japanese). Nakazawa's life itself is like an inverted version of Astro Boy. In Astro Boy, a grieving father re-creates his dead son in robot form using atomic power, whereas Nakazawa was a boy who lost his father due to the atomic bomb and seeks to honour his memory by spreading his anti-war message.

Related to 'I Saw It', is Studio Ghibli's profoundly moving animation 'Grave of the Fireflies'. The definitive account of why Hiroshima was destroyed, not in fact to avoid the US a costly ground invasion, as many have been taught to believe, but as the first blow in the coming Cold War with the Soviet Union, can be found in Gar Alperovitz's 'The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth'.

The Age of Selfishness (Ayn Rand, Morality, and the Financial Crisis) - Darryl Cunningham, 2015

I lived for 18 months in the US and was surprised by how frequently right-wing libertarian author Ayn Rand's books would pop up on bookshelves or in conversation. Her most popular novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, illustrated her philosophy of selfishness as a virtue and altruism as a moral failing. Darryl Cunningham here explains her influence on neoliberal politics and the current global economic crisis.

The book is divided into 3 sections: a biographical account of Rand's life, the events leading to the 2008 economic crisis, and the state of play towards the end of the Obama presidency.

Rand cuts a paranoid and controlling figure. Her first book was made into a film in 1949 but was a critical failure. Nevertheless, she received thousands of fan letters and soon developed a tight clique of obedient followers, one of whom was Alan Greenspan. The book's mid-section starts at the end of the Great Depression and the passing of the Glass-Steagall Act (1933) which separated retail from investment banking.

Greenspan re-enters the picture in 1987 when President Reagan appoints him as chairman of the Federal Reserve. The book sags a bit in the last section in discussing the pros and cons of the 'liberal' and 'conservative' mindset and defending the many flaws in Obama's Affordable Care Act but comes good in outlining the threat of UKIP and the Tea Party movement. At the time of writing Trump and Boris Johnson would not have been on the radar.

Cunningham's text is very readable and his artwork, while fairly simple, adds mood to the story and helps explain the key concepts well.

Marx for Beginners - Rius, 1972

Rius was a self-educated Mexican cartoonist and political activist. 'Marx para principiantes' was translated from spanish into english in 1976 and became a huge success, sparking off the '...for Beginners' series of graphic explainers on countless other topics from Einstein and Darwin, to Freud and Postmodernism. These books are still commonly seen in stores with their own dedicated displays.

The book commences with a biographical sketch of Marx's life. Rius then gives an historical account of western philosophy from pre-historical speculations and the ancient Greeks to the Renaissance and Marx's dialectical materialism. In looking at earlier thinkers, Rius draws out ideas with radical potential that were to influence Marxism. The last third explains Marx's political and economic theories with a detailed analysis of the Communist Manifesto.

Rius' style weaves simple and whimsical cartoon interludes with longer blocks of detailed text. The reader will surge through 20 pages only to be stopped by a dense page of Das Kapital. There's a cut and paste photocopied feel about it and a self-deprecating humour here that is neither patronising overly high-brow. Although definitely of its time, the ideas are weighty and it still reads well today.

Words and Rules by Steven Pinker

I'm going to try to keep track of all the books I read this year, so here's the first one. Words and Rules by Steven Pinker. I've read all his other books since The Language Instinct, but this one I left aside for a while as it seems to be his least accessible one.

Well perhaps I wouldn't recommend this to someone who was starting out with Pinker but I found it very enjoyable and illuminating nonetheless. There are countless interesting examples of odd quirks in the English language and I found his central argument that language is a system implemented in the brain as a collection of arbitrary sounds associated with meanings (words) coupled with the combinatorial power of a few simple rules (grammar) to be quite convincing. Research has revealed that these functions are performed in different parts of the brain, so that people with Alzheimer's tend to have damage in a certain location that causes difficulty with words, whereas Parkinson's sufferers have trouble with grammar.

Brimming with great ideas, reading this you really feel you are in the hands of the world's foremost expert in linguistics.