A pair of collections recently translated to English1 by Epicenter Comics (I recently covered one of their previous translations) gives North American readers a chance to experience the work of popular Italian creators Giancarlo Berardi (words) and Ivo Milazzo (pictures).
This appears to be the first time either of the pair’s major works has appeared in English (Milazzo had a short stint in an American Vampire anthology book, but if there’s anything else it slipped under my radar). The two are veterans of the Italian comics scene, with their creation Ken Parker being a long-running supporting column of European comics. I’ve certainly seen my fair share of various Ken Parker collections whenever I visited a comics shop in Europe, even after the series ceased continuous publication. This translation effort is therefore blessed, if for no other reason than it continues to broaden the English-speaking reader’s horizon.
The two books in question are Tom’s Bar and Ken Parker: The Breath and the Dream. Other than the same creative team these short (but handsome) albums share several other similarities: each is a collection of short stories focusing on a singular protagonist, each takes place in an historical setting in the United States (1940s for Tom’s Bar and what appears to be 1870s 2 for Ken Parker) and each represents a classical American genre: Tom’s Bar is an old-fashioned gangster story while Ken Parker is (of course) a Western.
Now, I call them "American genres" because they have been developed in the Unites States, take place in America 3 and are considered part of the American cultural ethos, alongside the likes of jazz and superhero comic books.
Except … people in America don’t seem to really make these type of works anymore. Oh, they exist – the cultural market is so wide and divergent that you can be sure something is being made in any genre right now. But their cultural cachet is almost nonexistent.
Consider the recent film Horizon by Kevin Costner4. It’s a big, intentionally old-school Western saga of the type that made its actor’s name … and yet it came and went in theaters without anyone noticing (except for some people snarking on the internet). The Western as a dominant cultural force is close to dead in America.
Not in Europe though. At least, not according to all these Western I keep seeing popping up on newspaper stands when visiting the continent. This is certainly true in comics, despite the heroic efforts of the Phillips clan, Western and Crime comics haven’t really caught on in the 21st century. These are genres born in America, but sent to live a long exile in Europe.
And many European creators don’t simply adopt visual motifs or story ideas – they set their stories in America and try to engage with the idea of America. It’s like the Great American Novel. Only these are not novels. And people who make ’em aren’t American. Also, many of these aren't so great. But the notion is solid enough.
The two works in question certainly aren’t, for all their other qualities, American. They are a copy of a copy; they refer not to actual history, even if some research might have been involved, and certainly not to a lived experience. Their main influences seems to be other, earlier works within the same genre. Which, to be fair, was true to American works of noir and Western for a good century now. Certainly, very few noir writers took the Dashiell Hammett approach of actually walking down these mean streets before writing about them5, which didn't necessarily harm their quality as creators. Still, a copy of a copy cannot help but tell us a few thing about the person doing the copying.
A Man, A Plan, A Moustache
Take the protagonist of Tom’s Bar. Tom Steele (what a name!) was seemingly made to be played by Humphrey Bogart6. He’s aging but still a hard man, like an oak tree. He never uses three words were one would suffice. He has a good heart but understands how the world works. He is respected for his prowess and his history, as seen in the first story where the mere mention of his name sends a young punk running. I have seen enough noir films to know the type.
Now, this isn’t Sin City. Berardi and Milazzo have also seen these old movies and probably read their Chandler all the way through. Sin City was a work seemingly based on the covers of the pulps rather than their contents, Frank Miller pushing the dial of the genre all way to 11 and forever tethering on the brink of self-parody. Tom’s Bar plays it straight. And there is a joy in seeing the old standards played by the sure hands of a master musician. Milazzo is certainly a sure hand. The look of his pages is a delight all by itself: the first panel of the first page, a shot of the titular bar from the outside, with the snow piling up in the streets and a car taking a slow turn around the corner, is like a shot from William Daniels.
Milazzo knows his snow. He know his rain. He knows how draw fedoras, whether laying stationary on a head or falling dramatically. He knows how to draw shadows and how to draw people running through them. He knows when to decorate a scene in details and when a close-up on a face composed of several lines is sufficient.
Milazzo knows it all and can do it all. But the stories he illustrates here do not rise to his level. The thing about noir, at the time when the term was first coined, is that wasn’t just a bunch of visual signifiers. The shadows and the suits were a sign of a time and a place, a world reborn after World War II, in which the clear simplicity of good and evil wasn’t as clear anymore. Violence no longer took place out in foreign fields, but within the borders of America and the hearts of American men and women.
I can’t help but compare this volume to Joe's Bar (by José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo, published in English by Titan ages ago), another work by foreign creators doing a series of noir-ish vignettes taking place around a bar. Joe’s Bar is a work dripping with passion and anger – about the state of minorities, immigrants, the poor. It has the trappings of noir, but not just the trappings. It engages with the real world rather than with older images. Joe’s Bar feels vital. It’s an original composition borne from the heart of its creators. Tom’s Bar, meanwhile, is a cover version. A damn good cover version, but you can sense the lack of emotional involvement.
Tom’s Bar is good, but in the manner a third-generation superhero work can be good. Jack Kirby was using these creations to engage with the world, most of the people who followed his lead used these creations to engage with themselves7. His modern-day descendants mostly engage with Kirby's ideas. Tom’s Bar has the noir shadows down, but these are also the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. We must not confuse them for the truth of things.
Pow Pow Pow
Ken Parker: The Breath and the Dream is better and worse than Tom’s Bar. Tom’s Bar apes the cynical world view expressed in the works of Fritz Lang, which is hard to do when your work becomes distant from the world you inhabit; The Breath and the Dream is a far less cynical work. Oh, it has violence and tragedy, but in its heart it’s a celebration of the west. Or rather, the idea of the west. Though unlike noir the Western genre was born far away from any historical reality, it was a codified myth on the silver screen and the pages of cheap pulps, long before comic books ever came into the picture. Milazzo's pen and brushes now turn towards color and a depiction of open spaces. It is a testimony to his strength as an artist that there is little uniting the two works visually other than sheer excellence (and the faces, the man has a pretty particular set of faces). The dark cities and cramped spaces give room, literally, to scenes showing the splendor of nature.
The Breath and the Dream, as befitting its name, is romantic comics (as in romanticism), in love with the world it depicts and what it could offer. Now, this sort of love has a name – sentimentalism. It’s a work, or a rather a collection of works, that could be easily qualified as cloying. The stories are simple. Tom’s Bar gestures at the complexity of human existence, the give and take, the compromises of living in a society built upon crime and corruption. Ken Parker depicts a straightforward world that approaches a Disney picture.
What can one make of the story in which Ken almost manages to hunt a deer, for substance, before discovering she is a mother and then working hard to save her, setting up a connection with the whole animal family like Jesus in the wilderness. Can we accept a professional trapper, a man making a living in these harsh environments, is seemingly unaware of familial relationship among animals until he encounters one himself? I understand what the story is trying to do, but simply doesn’t work with a grown adult protagonist.
It certainly doesn’t help that story is silent. All of The Breath and the Dream is composed of stories sans speech bubbles8. Yours truly has a particular bugbear with silent comics. They are well and good in theory, especially with an artist of Milazzo’s pedigree9; in effect I found many silent comics, including classics of the genre, to be valiant efforts with little payoffs.
Works such as Arzach, The System, A Land Called Tarot and Om are successful insofar as they present story information with serious limitations put upon themselves; but there is little depth to them. In fact, there seems to be almost an expectation that depth would present itself ex nihilo, from the mere fact of silence. Not every work can John Cage’s 4’33". It’s not to say that is impossible to make a silent comic that is both legible and a truly sublime experience. Jim Woodring did just that, but it’s a rare thing. A hard thing. The Breath and the Dream doesn’t manage it.
Does Ken Parker tell us anything about America? About that period in history? Even about the character of Ken Parker, as a man? It tells us that he was very sad to watch people die, that he loves animal and that nature is pleasing to him. These things do not make for a character study. Compare to Doug Wildey’s Rio, another well-illustrated Western saga by an grand master artist. Rio has a more conservative approach to storytelling, but manages to wring out an actual character from it, a notion of being in particular time and place. That's because Rio (the character) can talk, and communicates with other characters, setting up conflict and themes.
Berardi and Milazzo put these limitations on themselves, but then failed to burst through them. Like Tom’s Bar, this Ken Parker collection is not without its pleasures. If nothing else the choice to feature short stories means that none of tales overstay their welcome. The previously-mentioned Tex: Captain Jack, is a better story, but is simply too long for its own good. Ken Parker is worth a read (or, to be honest, a glance) simply to see what next trick Milazzo would pull out of his sleeve. If Ken Parker works, it works because of him.
Also, there’s the final story. It’s almost nothing, the shortest of all tales collected in both volumes by a wide margin. It has a completely different attitude and approach than the rest of collection, almost antithetical to it. It doesn’t work in spite of being so different, it works because of it. It’s a really dumb thing, which I wouldn’t dream of spoiling, but it almost makes the rest of the collection worthwhile.
Once Upon a Time in America
What can we learn about America from these two books? Absolutely nothing. There is, however, something to gleaned about Europe. The culture America left beyond, yesterday’s pulp which the respected classic of today10 is still alive and kicking in the continent. Maybe it’s because it has been left behind? America, stereotypically, was always more concerned with the future, while Europe was with the past. You can see it in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, who found much to admire about the new country, but also a lot to dislike. Quote Richard Sennett: “Throughout his American journey, Tocqueville was struck by the lightweight character of American settlement – nothing was made to last, nothing was permanent. The reason was that the American ‘new man’ was too driven to settle; ‘keep moving’ was the frontier mentality." Over a century later his countryman Georges Duhamel was much less ambiguous in his book, the directly titled America the Menace, writing: “America seems bound to lead the rest of humanity along the path of the worst experiments.”
Duhamel was certain in his revulsion. For him America was the future, and the future was terrible – noisy, smelly, over-built, over-done, over-developed, over-anything-and-everything. The USA was rushing towards tomorrow without considering its past. Here we are, a century later, and America once again left its past behind11. And it is Europe that rushes in to fill its place. Only in Europe could you find such high-end, critically-acclaimed works celebrating formerly low-brow American genres.
The makers of European comics keep coming back to these genres, to these visions of America long-gone, because America has forgotten about it. Back to Duhamel: “America is devoted to its ephemeral works. It erects, not monuments, but merely buildings.” If the USA won’t build its monuments, then the Italians (and the French, the Belgians, the Croatians, etc.) will do it for them. They do it with love and in their heart and yearning in their pens. Perhaps they do not fully understand what it is they are depicting, this alien landscape called "America." They understand what it is in their dreams. It is the past, rising again.
The post Cowboys and Criminals: <i>Ken Parker</i> and <i>Tom’s Bar</i> appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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