Oliver Schrauwen came to visit the other day. He arrived in a small box left on the stoop. After inviting him in, I was surprised to discover he was larger than anticipated. Large enough to displace my cat, which he did as I set him on the table next to my chair where the cat often rests.
It had been on my calendar for a while, very clearly marked: Time for O. Schrauwen. An appointment I somehow managed to avoid for many years - but sooner or later time always runs out. And indeed, the time had come. Mr. Schrauwen sat patiently on the table, waiting.
It is a singular advantage of the medium that a particularly large graphic novel - oh, there’s that term! I hate that term, I really do. I try to avoid using it, for so many reasons, not the least of which being it’s terrible branding. It’s always been terrible branding. A significant chunk of the populace think “graphic” means “sexual” so, good news, Team Comics. Stick a quarter in your ass because you played yourself. The term, especially used as a blanket genre indicator, is effectively meaningless, encompassing as it is does so many kinds of products, from European imports to compilations of superhero floppies. It just sounds goofy and comes from the same place of insecurity as Stan Lee trying to coin “comicbook” - no spaces - because he desperately wanted to differentiate what he did from what they did. Would you rather I called them bande dessinée? I’d do it if I thought it would help me get the babes. Do you think that would work better than saying “graphic novel?” Sound off in the comments.
But, then, we turn and see Mr. Schrauwen sitting there on the table. Oh, yes, he’s a large object, as large as a comic book can be and yet remain readable without a table. You still need to make the effort to sit down and read it, likely in little sips over a span of time. It was serialized in advance. It is - and I say this advisedly and with consent of legal council - the story of a single day told over the span of a Brobdingnagian narrative.
Oh, me. Oh, me. Friend.
Yes, yes. Mr. Schrauwen you are certainly a graphic novel, aren’t you just. Now you may be rolling your eyes, preemptively clucking at Your Humble Critic, that’s hardly fair. Don’t look at me! I’m not the one who made the book, nor the one who coined the genre.
Now, contrary to popular belief, the question of whether or not I have read Ulysses doesn’t come up very often at all. That would have come as a surprise to the me of three decades ago, sadly. In any event, I have read it, every damn word, I sat down in a comfy chair and put in two solid weeks of eight hour days with Ulysses on my lap alongside the compendium of footnotes. And I read every word in the book of footnotes as well. Learned an immense amount about the world from James Joyce, to be frank. Of course, all that effort means it’s a lot easier to respect Joyce than to love him. I recommend the experience as formative and illuminating, but it is nonetheless hard work under the best of circumstances. A degree of discipline is required to get anything out of it.
Or, as Thiebault, our Sunday protagonist himself, puts it, in the opening pages, upon deciding to begin his day by reading a book, “shouldn’t give in to the lure of social media. I’m sticking with this book, … while the entire world is watching its devices in a zombified stupor. It’s become a rare skill, really, … to just sit down and read a book.”
“I like to be complimented by my authors,” I wink at Mr. Schrauwen upon reading this passage. “It’s a good feeling to know that the writer thinks I’m smart for hanging out with them.”
Indeed, that was rather the point, to make of reading a highly specialized act in and of itself, to create an object that stymied the urge for casual consumption and rewarded monkish devotion. A most uncommercial assertion in a landscape increasingly driven by commercial urges. The Moderns knew how to use form above all. They invented the political aesthetic of the twentieth century when they boiled down all those poetic terms to make verse blow by like a race car. “Petals on a wet black bough,” and all that. They know how to be concise, and they also knew how to monopolize your eye. Two sides of the same coin. A book like Ulysses commands attention as an object to be apprehended, taken on its own terms or not at all. Function follows form and form is a measure of human attention. Much of the great challenge in making art is managing that attention. The moderns cracked the chest cavity of mechanized man and delineated the contours of his clockwork. Many of them also became enthusiastic fascists. Not unconnected facts!
Not Joyce, I should say, who veered towards the other end of the question, towards socialism. In case you were worried! Ezra Pound being a sadly timely figure. No, the thing to worry about Joyce is the love letters to his wife. They’re online. I don’t recommend them unless you really want to know what he was into. And I mean, really want to know. Do not complain to me later that you didn’t want to know.
Anyway. This is our literary pedigree, Mr. Schrauwen. I notice you’ve placed some “stream of consciousness” personal narration in these word balloons. Yes, yes. Very good. And the story of the day is a man waiting to be reunited with his girlfriend you say? Yes, yes. And this time, it’s the girlfriend who is engaged on a trans-Mediterranean journey while the boyfriend sits at home and thinks about having an affair? I’m sorry! I’ll move on. You get the point. An attempt has been made to brandish serious literary genealogy, the distaff Ulysses in graphic novel form. Being in a partnership to someone who travels a lot for work is generally considered a problematic situation, to judge from the history of all art and culture. Someone’s always coming home, or there wouldn’t be stories. Homer may have been on to something, if we’re being frank with ourselves at the end of the day.
So what’s it all about then? Well, as I said, its a “day in the life,” more or less, of Thiebault Schrauwen, a fictionalized version of the cartoonist’s cousin, a Sunday from 2017. An absolutely aimless day in the retelling, notable only for being the end of a significant journey on the part of Schrauwen’s partner Migali, doing something or other in Africa. I went back and check to see if it’s mentioned, but unless it’s mentioned in passing and I missed it, we’re not told where precisely. It’s a place where his partner moves freely and with purpose through streets filled with people, against a backdrop of commerce and bureaucracy pointedly juxtaposed against Thiebault’s frankly offensive daydreams about the lawlessness of generic African “hellholes.” I don’t think I’d let my cousin draw my possibly purported most racist daydreams (plural) in an internationally acclaimed graphic novel publishing event, so he’s got that on me.
That’s the guiding spirit, for better or for worse, every stray thought and deed, suspended in amber. He gets a James Brown song in his head and so too do we. We see Thiebault masturbating in the book’s opening pages, and that’s also coincidentally when we realize Schrauwen has no intention of going easy on our tender and delicate liberal sensibilities. Leopold Bloom takes the kids to the pool in the opening pages of Ulysses. Don’t you see? Our bourgeois comfort zone must be violated.
I spent years studying the specific topic of literary modernism, forgive me if they jump out. The stylistic and thematic advances of the Moderns became the backbone for the popular culture of the century that followed. All quite successfully commodified. They’re still with us, of course, and their concerns. But so are Dickens, and Shakespeare, and Homer for that matter.
Schrauwen is Belgian, meaning I have very little idea what comic books he read past the age of twelve, assuming he got Corto Maltese in under the wire. You know I’m underread. It’s formally engaged in the way of the great American vanguard of the last two decades - folks like Kevin Huizenga, Sammy Harkham, Chris Onstad, people who grew in the soil mulched by the sustained mainstream literary crossover success of Chris Ware. Because Schrauwen is European however you don’t necessarily feel like he’s having an argument in his head with the guy who draws Iron Man for a living.
The problem is not a shortage of truly breathtaking cartooning, no. Pretty much every page looks good, looks interesting. He’s trying something with ever flip of the page, constantly shifting through different techniques, freely adapting various literary and cinematic effects. Accomplished to a confident degree.
Let’s begin with the introduction of the book’s alter ego, a secondary protagonist to serve as a shadow to Thiebault, much as Stephen Daedalus skulks in the backdraft of Leopold. Rik is his cousin, a Mephistophelean free spirit represented in Thiebault’s memory as a smear of bright red, dotted across the page. The first vivid thoughts of the day: not wanting to get dragged back into whatever’s going to happen if I go out drinking with my cousin. That move right there, boom. Bright magenta suddenly slamming against your eyes. Remarkably effective. The memories of casual personal nudity, public drunkenness, and even the occasional fight with law enforcement, which he seems to get away with more or less because none of these people seem to be struggling in any way. An early section of the book is devoted to unreeling the history of a bad night out, a robbery of a beer shop and subsequent police chase. Just not the kind of thing you want to be worrying about all the time as your thirties turn into your forties.
The color changes throughout the book, owing to the technical restrictions of original serialization. Each section makes exclusive use of two colors, while managing to get quite a bit of juice out of that specific color combination. It really is a virtuoso work of craft. If it sounds like I’ve been damning with faint praise, it’s possible to overlook the fact that replicating the stylistic and thematic concerns of an extraordinarily polyglot piece of prose virtuosity is not something just anyone can pop out of bed and get cracking on. Flip to any random section to be impressed: how about pages 189-190 (see below)? A mouse crawls out of a Coke bottle and we see it begin to explore what appears to be a sewage treatment center, a massive adventure for a tiny little guy that pulls out to become a frying pan in Thiebault’s kitchen. Breathtaking stuff.
Now, in case you were worried that Mr. Schrauwen himself, currently perched on my lap and flipped open to the center spread, would not be making an appearance in his own comic, well, friend, I am here to reassure you that Mr. Schrauwen does indeed appear. A couple times, actually, at the back of chapters. In the middle of the book, just after Thiebault burns his eyebrow off and Rik makes a scene at a cafe, Mr. Schrauwen shows up with his real-life cousin, in the act of discussing the story. “This story will be exciting,” Thiebault says, to which Mr. Schrauwen replies, “if I do my work right, it will be exciting! I guarantee it!” He says this while vaping.
That won me over, I will admit, as self-deprecation usually does. There’s a lot to win you over. Every page, just about, devoted to something a bit different. Different ways of drawing, different ways of moving around a single color on the page. He’s funny, too, which helps, and that shouldn’t be underestimated. Would you like to know what Thiebault’s job is? He makes fonts. You just made a face! Tell us what kind of face you made in the comments, be sure to like and subscribe.
My goodness, what a life! Being able to just … chill a lot, apparently. Letting that kerning breathe before the harvest. Reaper man’s coming, baby.
Nice fantasy, isn’t it? A life where you’re not always worried about getting people to click on your link when they really don’t want to click on your link. No offense to you, but nobody likes clicking on anyone’s link, and therein lies the rub. Two things can be possible at once: Thiebault Schrauwen’s life of extraordinary privilege is utterly absurd, and also the necessary consequence of a life without stress and ample employment in the arts and culture industries. Those beneficent conditions invariably portend the existence of absolutely absurd human beings. I would have liked to have been an absolutely absurd human being, but alas, some of us have to work for a living.
The back page of the book, incidentally, features the statement: “This book was published with assistance from Flanders Literature,” and there’s the logo for Flanders Literature right underneath. Imagine that! Filling out a form and sending it into a bureaucrat, for the purpose of procuring funding in the making a comic book about dickin’ around. It must be nice to live in a country where your government isn’t actively trying to kill you. Do they even still make those anymore?
Joyce understood that idea, at least. Written during a period of great turmoil, across the globe and at home for Ireland. And yet set in a not-too-distant past, fleeing past that horizon of recent tragedies. There is little hint of broader tragedy in Sunday, either, without implication. At its most granular, the story of Sunday is the story of a small neighborhood’s worth of acquaintances going about their business and built around the daily encounters of the lonely font maker as an organizing principle. Pull out a bit and see that context. This was set and created through what has been, by any measure, a hellacious period in human history, of the type that seems almost certain to devolve into more hellacious still with frighteningly imminent certainty. But they’re doing pretty good here, considering the whole place will be underwater in a few decades’ time. Don’t worry, if there’s a hell below, we’re all going to go.
There are multiple animals, too, cats and mice carrying about their business in blithe inattention of the people moving in their midst. Schrauwen takes the cat seriously as a member of the community, and the mouse too. It’s all intercut together, in extraordinarily effective passages of bricolage, panels from multiple storylines and continents strung together in musical significance. It adds up to a formidable tapestry. A whole world of creatures implicated in the connections between a few dozen.
What is a day, broken down in slideshow form like this? A cross-section of social and economic interactions strung across the globe. Everything is necessarily connected to everything else, and to prove it the book is going to show you an entire community implicated in the existence of one extraordinarily absurd human being. To be fair, Thiebault is aware, as he explains in a passing reverie - “got to be careful though, you can head into a dead end without knowing it. You think you’re just passing by, and suddenly you’re stuck.” He makes fonts for a living, and he seems to suffer from a bit of artist’s block at that august profession. Even though we already have the perfectly fine Times New Roman and Helvetica. I just don’t see what else there is to do in the field. At least not since they canceled Raygun, which strangely enough has happened twice in my life.
The climax of our novel comes in the form of an extended colloquy on the 2006 filmic adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, starring Tom Hanks. Thiebault has no idea when his girlfriend is actually supposed to be getting back, so he resolves to smoke a joint and watch a movie. A perfectly normal lazy evening’s activity. Thiebault gets baked in the company of Hanks’ Robert Langdon. Now, in the interest of fairness, I’ve not read nor seen The Da Vinci Code - I know, quelle surprise. Tom Hanks didn’t really look like himself in the posters. Thiebault pauses the movie and we linger on random stills of Hanks as Langdon.
Meanwhile, his wife Migali makes her way home. She hooks up with the B-plot - Rik has spent the day in the company of Nora, the woman for whom Thiebault spends much of novel pining. Yes, yes. And it ends with Penelope falling asleep and thinking about Blazes Boylan. Anyway. Nora possibly has something with Rik, who as it turns out isn’t a completely terrible person. He works an a facility for senior citizens, not work for the faint of heart. But on his days off he goes out and gets into sloshed altercations with randos in cafes, so he’s not doing that great either. Nora could do better and she realizes it, in real time.
“Well, now, Mr. Schrauwen,” I say, setting the book down and gathering my thoughts, “we’ve had quite a time. You rather demand the attention.” Mr. Schrauwen shrugs and continues to empty the bag of Takis into his maw.
“Do you imagine I’ve lingered too long on the Joyce comparison? Perhaps even if you’ve read this far, you might think it a tendentious link. To which one can only reply: parallels this granular cannot be the product of mere coincidence. You don’t just ‘accidentally’ build a book according to the same blueprint as one of Homer’s two great masterpieces. Maybe you got lucky - maybe your cousin just happens to be our modern Molly Bloom, with hijinks to match. Maybe it’s a really strong hook that’s nonetheless kind of impersonal, by design.”
“Perhaps that’s an impressive achievement.” The words catch like ashes in my throat. “Oh, it is impressive, don’t get me wrong. You want your blood? There you go, finally, a blurb for the ages. You win, Mr. Schrauwen.
“But what were we playing for, all this time, with you perched on a table eating all my Takis?”
“I dunno, man,” he replies, “this is your bag. I’m just a book. At the end of the day I’m just what you project on to me.”
Moral didacticism in the arts has come back into vogue in recent years, for a number of reasons. I realize it is incumbent upon the contemporary critic to bewail such tendencies as a sign of incipient barbarism but sadly I remain a heterodox thinker in this regard. It’s neither good nor bad but merely the fashion of an epoch, and as fashion goes moral didacticism has been one of the more popular fashions for human culture across the millennia. The Moderns didn’t invent ambiguity, no, but they certainly harnessed it. That ambiguity was itself an achievement against the weft of commercial impulses, which itself was later was certainly codified as a premium effect across commercial media. If you’re wondering where all the moral certainty of recent years came from, remember that ambiguity is first and foremost a luxury item, culturally speaking.
There’s no right or wrong attached to Thiebault’s actions. Much as we may look at the fictionalized “him” differently for having seen such a candid slice of his life. His personal thoughts - at least the personal thoughts of his comic book alter-ego - are often rough, occasionally disqualifying, but also ultimately private. We are all free from censure in the privacy of our own mind. I mean, it’s not like he acts out on his most destructive whims, right? Well I mean he does send a garbled text to Nora that reads more than a little bit like a come-on while he’s waiting for his wife to get back from the airport. But besides that. Thiebault daydreams about being a stand-up comic and making a reputation for discussing “problematic” material. Is he going to be the next Lenny Bruce? No, definitively not. Is there something pathetic in wanting to be able to transgress without having a reason aside from a general discomfort at assenting to imposed boundaries. A strangely central and galvanizing urge in 2024, to judge from the state of the world.
It’s not like we’re being called to judgement. Except, clearly, we are. What else is fiction for, any kind of fiction? A cartoonist who sits down to make a giant book filled with a bunch of little guys running around and doing shit for hundreds of pages is ultimately hoping that you will indeed become invested enough to form a judgement of some kind. If not, what’s the point? You want a book good enough to sell the next book. You want a book to stir the blood. But Thieubault’s just kind of a schmuck, in the full scheme of things. Neither bad nor good, based on the evidence presented here. And it’s hard to build an epic around a schmuck.
However, the book ends well enough to make me forgive its mass. It ends at midnight, right before a birthday party. You don’t get the party, you just the preparations for the party. There’s a great deal of possibility still in that moment of aporia - if you’ll forgive the reference, it ends on a “yes . . . and?” What’s going to happen after midnight? Well, probably nothing much, in the scheme of things. People will carry on with their lives. Nothing really happened over the course of the book, all told. That’s rather the point. A very banal day in the lives of very banal people, existing on a range of relative likability. Life! It all looks important because we’re seeing it preserved, presumably enhanced by artistic license to a greater or lesser degree. A cross section of loose leaf reality patiently molded into very precise shape.
It’s easy to forgive a story that ends well. For my part, I hope the book finds a good audience. Schrauwen deserves the attention. As a comic book it makes a very strong art object, put it on a table and what yourself flip through it for a couple weeks’ at a time. An extraordinarily nice looking book from stem to stern.
“Lemme guess,” Mr. Schrauwen chuckles, chapped lips caked with spicy dust, “you just wish it had been anything but Joyce.”
“Literally anything in the entire universe.”
“Well, can’t win ‘em all.”
“Listen to me, so insufferable. Everyone should read James Joyce. James Joyce is great. Everyone should read everything, kids. The people who don’t want you reading contemporary YA with sexual themes don’t really want you reading Dickens or Shakespeare, either, and certainly not an old reprobate like Joyce. Your time is more better spent working to make someone else more rich, everyone knows that. Anyway. Read everything you can get your hands on as a matter of policy. It’s all important, it all matters. But me, specifically, I’ve done my time in the Joyce mines. I mean, he’s no Proust.”
“There’s a Proust reference in here!” he answers, indignant. “The cigarettes. Everyone quits smoking in their thirties so smoking a cigarette reminds people of being young. Tobacco as our madeleine. That’s why vaping is so inherently tragicomic.”
“Yeah, I’ll give you that. I have never once smoked a cigarette so it’s not where my mind goes for the association. Anyway. I’d be happy if people were more interested in the Moderns, because I think they were all fascinating people, and the issues of their lives were strangely and disconcertingly relevant to our own. Everyone should have the chance to get sick of ol’ Jimmy Joyce for themselves. So, fair game to you for taking advantage of the centenary.”
“I’m not completely witless,” Mr. Schrauwen groused. “If I play my cards right there might just be an appearance on All Things Considered in it for me.”
“I hope the real you doesn’t get that joke. If so, I’m sorry. You don’t deserve that. At the end of the day it’s pure jealousy. Pure animal spite.”
“Thank you for being performatively honest,” Mr. Schrauwen nodded.
“It seems like a good life, frankly. Ample arts funding should be a bedrock human right, but it just isn’t. Everyone should have that. Everyone most emphatically does not. Right now, from where I’m writing, it seem a very distant utopia. The prosperous ‘present moment’ we see in this brief snapshot of Belgian life in 2017 is the end product of hundreds of years of irregular development across multiple large land masses. You show us this process with the acuity of the old Dutch Masters and their sumptuous odes to guilt-ridden mortality. There’s just one glimpse, tucked into the first section, of migrants on a raft crossing the Mediterranean. Enough to give the whole game away in a single panel. You know, I took out two whole paragraphs that was just me talking about the Dutch Masters, all that wealth and splendor. I thought it might be impressive, but it was just fatuous detail easily distilled: Where did they get all that money, back in the seventeenth century? Well, they found it, okay? Good cloth, as is well known, famously makes itself.”
“So it sounds like you got something out of the process, after all,” Mr. Schrauwen said, with no small satisfaction. “Despite your protests, and despite your selfless sacrifice of cutting out additional paragraphs specifically designed to make you look smart.”
“How else am I supposed to impress women, if not through the medium of comic book reviews? Only slightly less fatuous than fonts, and only because significantly less money is involved. It more resembles heroic sacrifice for the good of the commonwealth. Oh, bother. I suppose you’re not completely witless, at that. Thoughts were provoked.”
“Just don’t call me late for dinner, dude. Oh yeah, you should probably go back and pick up on that thread you dropped back on the first page.”
“What thread?”
“You know, when you went off on the tangent about how much you hate the term ‘graphic novel.’ Great rhetorical technique, by the way, convincing people of your bonafides as a crank before you even get going. You started to say, ‘It is a singular advantage of the medium that a particularly large graphic novel -’ and then you got distracted, as if by a shiny object.”
“Oh, yeah,” I mumble, caught red-handed by Mr. Schrauwen, himself red-handed from stealing my bag of Takis. Someone ate the entirety of that bag of Takis over the space of roughly thirty-six hours and it wasn’t me. “Alight,” I finally begin, “it is a singular advantage of the medium that a particularly large graphic novel can arrest your attention like no other work of art, simply by being sufficiently heavy.”
“Is that your final takeaway?”
“I mean, what else is there to say? To paraphrase the great Shelly Duvall: you’re large. Now, much as I wish I could slide you into a place of honor on my bookshelf, the fact is that I can’t really have bookshelves right now because Rodger just wants to destroy them. So for your own good I’m going to put you in a box and forget about you for long periods of time.”
“So’k,” Mr. Schrauwen sniffed. “Born to die, motherfucker.”
With one more jolly drag on his vape, I closed the box and slid it under another pile of similar boxes, fellow fugitives from a dangerous animal.
The post No space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused: Olivier Schrauwen’s imagined Sunday appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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