Review by New York Times Review
SOMETHING about comics attracts confessional work - really confessional work. Ever since the underground-comix era of the late 1960s and early '70s, when Justin Green poured his Catholic guilt into "Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary" and Robert Crumb gleefully skewered his own unsavory impulses, there's been a strain of cartooning that would be a vicious invasion of privacy if it weren't about its creators. Art Spiegelman's first book, "Breakdowns" (1977), combined the obsessions that have defined his work ever since: agonized personal revelations and savage interrogation of comics as a medium. (Look again at that title.) Now it's been rereleased, in an edition that pairs a facsimile of the original with along new autobiographical piece, in which Spiegelman presents painful anecdotes about his artistic evolution and his family relationships in the mock-comedic form of vintage newspaper funnies. Yet the new material feels muted and slightly too assured alongside the fuming, raw energy of the original "Breakdowns." In the 1970s, nearly all of Spiegelman's work was years ahead of art-comics trends, from the original version of "Maus" (a three-page sketch about Spiegelman's father's experiences during the Holocaust, which evolved into his two-volume magnum opus in the '80s) to "The Malpractice Suite," an extended mutilation of an old "Rex Morgan M.D." strip that becomes more convoluted and deranged with every panel. Spiegelman draws them all with a frantic intensity, as if his pen were about to slash through his drawing board and crack his table in half. Jonathan Ames has made a career of neurosis-baring in autobiographical essays and prose memoirs like "What's Not to Love?," and he covers the same territory in his first stab at the comics form. "The Alcoholic," drawn in smooth, chunky caricatures by Dean Haspiel (who has also illustrated some of Harvey Pekar's autobiographical comics), is supposedly fiction, but it concerns a character called "Jonathan A." who stumbles boozily through events that may sound familiar to readers of Ames's first-person essays. Unfortunately, the tales of adolescent sexual confusion, a receding hairline, digestive difficulty and a rather unexceptional 9/11 experience don't quite add up to a coherent story - the ending's quick epiphany feels forced and tacked on. For that matter, the way nubile young things keep throwing themselves at "Jonathan A." suggests an irritating self-aggrandizement behind his self-deprecation. ANOTHER artist in the confessional tradition is David Heatley, whose first book, "My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down," seems to encompass every uncomfortable thought he's ever had about sexuality, race and his family. The section "Sex History" is just what it says it is: Heatley's nearly complete sexual history, from childhood games onward, documented in more than 700 tiny, doodly, wobbly-lined panels (although he draws a discreet veil over his relationship with his wife). It's riveting for prurient reasons, of course, but also for its apparently comprehensive honesty: he's perfectly willing to come off as a callow jerk. "Black History," a much longer application of the same technique to his relationships with every black person he's ever known, is a little more coy - he tries to make his internalized racism shrivel up by exposing it to harsh sunlight, but he's also trying to reassure us that he's down. (Padding the story with handwritten commentary on his favorite hip-hop records was probably a bad idea.) But the final third of the book, devoted to his family tree, centers on a beautifully unsettling mosaic of comic-strip jokes that seem to be at his parents' expense but inevitably end up ridiculing his own dealings with them. The book culminates in a lengthy piece about the birth of his children in the context of the generations before theirs: Heatley isn't the only one, he knows, who's ever heard a woman gasping and a newborn crying. David Heatley records his every uncomfortable thought, top, and Art Spiegelman revisits his artistic break-throughs with experimental comics in the late 1970s. Douglas Wolk is the author of "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean." He writes frequently about comics for the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Autobiography, particularly of the self-lacerating variety, has been a staple of alternative comics since such groundbreaking 1970s and '80s works as Harvey Pekar's American Splendor and Art Spiegelman's Maus. Heatley presents his life thematically. He opens with his entire Sex History, from prekindergarten explorations to postmarital attempts to kick his addiction to masturbation and including vividly disquieting pages from a dream journal. Subsequent sections depict a life's worth of encounters with African Americans and relations with Mom, Dad, and other kin. From it all, we acquire a comprehensive portrait, from mildly troubled youth and conflicted sexuality to recent religious conversion and fatherhood. Like Chris Ware, Heatley uses postage-stamp-sized panels to cram a massive amount of narrative onto each page. But his naive, slapdash drawings couldn't be farther from Ware's neurotically meticulous style; their lack of sophistication implies an unshielded honesty. Although more conventional prose memoirs may be the ones ensconced on best-seller lists, it's hard to imagine Heatley's story being told as effectively in any other medium than comics.--Flagg, Gordon Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
You've seen his art on the New York Times op-ed page and on the cover of The New Yorker. Now read his debut graphic autobiography. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Cartoonist Heatley explores his family history, relationships with his parents, sexuality and racism. Thanks in large part to the work of luminaries like Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware, autobiographical (or semi-autobiographical) comics have become a popular means for insightfully self-aware artists to depict revelatory moments in their lives, a tradition Heatley carries on in his debut collection. At first glance, the often crudely drawn figures, condensed into sometimes maddeningly repetitive panels, give the impression of caricature, particularly in scenes depicting far-out dream sequences and in a prolonged chapter detailing each sexual encounter of the author's life, which run the gamut from innocent summer-camp smooches to graphic bisexual explorations. A closer reading, however, reveals the depth of Heatley's insight into his own character and, by extension, society at large. An unflinching, occasionally awkward chapter illustrating the author's relationship with black friends and acquaintances showcases the struggle of a white man whose love and respect for black music and culture elicits a range of reactions, from true acceptance and brotherhood to outright hostility and righteous indignation. While the aforementioned sections and subsequent meditations on the author's relationships with his divorced parents are uneven in their efforts to convey larger themes and insights, the concluding chapter, "Kin," is a marvel of storytelling economy. By turns touching and comical, it takes the seemingly mundane history of a typical American family and turns it into a mini-epic, a rivetingly intimate narrative that does far more than convey the history of how Heatley's great-grandparents came together--it also serves as a microcosm of what makes the combination of text and art so well-suited to the autobiographical genre. Consistently engaging and occasionally self-indulgent, with sporadic moments of excellence. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
