So, Tuesday was cartoonist and graphic novelist James Sturm’s lecture here in Baton Rouge. I wasn’t sure what kind of turnout he would get, but I was pleasantly surprised to see well over a hundred people cramming the lecture hall—some standing, some sprawled on the floor along the walls. Spotted: Baton Rouge literati Laura Mullen (Murmur) and Victor Gischler (Pistol Poets, the forthcoming Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse).
Sturm proved to be an engaging, articulate, and funny speaker, managing to make a compelling case for the distinctiveness and significance of graphic storytelling (or sequential art, or cartooning, or whatever) without sounding like he had clambered onto a soapbox. And we got a lot of insight into his own artistic process. Sturm professed to be surprised whenever his work is described as “lyrical”—as it often is—but I think it’s an apt characterization. His work possesses a warmth and beauty even when dealing with the grotesque and the horrific and the violent. His graphic novel about the 1801 Cane Ridge Kentucky camp meeting, The Revival, is often harrowing and heart-breaking; but it’s also speckled with grace notes such as his depiction of a young girl’s irresistible, infectious enthusiasm that her friend has seen a spirit leap from a body at a faith healing. One of my favorite examples is from The Golem’s Mighty Swing. In one striking moment, Sturm provides a vision of transcendence and stillness even in the midst of a tense, violent scene in which a vengeful mob lays siege to the players in their dugout: he contrasts the churning brutality of the mob with the gentle dappling of light on a praying player’s uniform as it streams through the wire mesh of a dugout.
Sturm’s newest book, James Sturm’s America: God, Gold, and Golems collects the two works mentioned above plus Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight, and it’s well worth getting. The jacket features a blurb by Jonathan Lethem, who calls Sturm’s work “an antidote to cultural amnesia” and draws comparisons to music anthologist Harry Smith and poet William Carlos Williams. Impressive company indeed! But I buy the connection: Sturm’s understated but evocative line work, his stark but —yes—lyrical pages, suggest an affectionate but unflinching appraisal of America’s past in all its chaotic, messy glory and shame, and of the meanings of that past for our present.
I think my favorite part of the night came during the Q&A. There were a lot of good academic-type questions about the relationship between fiction and history, about the process of collaboration, about the cultural role of comics today. But the best question wasn’t really a question at all: it came from a mechanical engineering student who said, essentially, that Sturm’s lecture had made him wonder if he was wasting his life. Sturm didn’t talk the kid into joining up at CCS and taking an MFA, but still, it was amazing and sort of inspiring to see an audience reacting not just with interest but with emotion to an artist’s work and vision.
New York has five excerpts from Golem’s Mighty Swing available online—if you haven’t checked out Sturm’s work before, this is a decent place to start.
I really wanted to make this but had prior obligations (not to mention various hangovers from the previous evening’s Saints game). Great to see that it went well!
A great event and a very interesting presentation. I’m glad I made it. I found myself at dinner with Greg Rucka recently (5 points for name dropping) and was able to “talk comics” with him slightly. Turns out Rucka is a fan of Golem’s Mighty Swing.
Victor Gischler
I’ll have to look for this. I think I’m wasting my life!
. . . The sunlight on the uniform during a tense and violent time, well, that is poetic—lyrical—and Williams (William Carlos) would have probably liked it (as have Whitman, Owen, Crane, Hemingway, etc.). (My favorite short Williams poem, “Between Walls”, shows us how to finally focus on the glimmer in an otherwise ordinary or dull or bleak moment [hey, maybe it’s broken but it shines].)
These renderings of Americana are Carter-family real. But—but (and also): I recommend James Sturm’s Unstable Molecules (a Fantastic Four prequel), published by Marvel a few years ago. Here, amid military-industrial preoccupation (could Vapor Girl really marry Professor Walk-the-Line?), the young woman who would become Vapor Girl is reading—yes!—Peyton Place (ah, hope in a book! Liberation!). So, in an age of stay-the-course/fall-in-line, that Vapor may be more like the smell of emerging Feminism. Meanwhile, Vapor Girl’s kid brother (before becoming The Human Torch) is a sort of orphan under big sister’s watch and—well, would you believe: the kid’s big sister’s former boyfriend enters the scene, by chance, and—well, would you believe: he’s a sort of Jack Kerouac figure, literally reading to the kid from On The Road! There is awakening, protest, literacy through these things and through literature itself woven into Sturm’s imagining of how these Fantastic Four may have stumbled upon their epiphanies. The example, like one of Hal Hartley’s best films, brings us rather back to ourselves (how anti-sensational you say? How empowering.)
Unstable Molecules represents a sweet and compelling take on what our culture would otherwise rather skip-to-the-chase and call Super. Super is ordinary. “The ordinary is made extraordinary by your attention to it” my teacher Allen Ginsberg used to say. (Ginsberg—friend of that dumpster archivist-curator-alchemist Harry Smith that Lethem mentions in Sturm’s three G’s blurb; and partner in crime and enlightenment with Mr. On-The-Road himself . . . .)
It comes down to the bone. So now, let’s all go out and be extraordinary.
—Peter Money
Friends of The Society for Anonymous Poets
(and personal contact for Mr. Joey King)