Memoirs as graphic novels have advantages. Everybody knows text-only memoirs need something on the order of a thousand words to equal the worth of a single picture. Visual cues allow us to imagine the story from perspectives unimagined by text-only memoirists.
Telling one's story in illustrations provides a sort of distance between reality and all the James Fey-like details that can crowd out the narrative. Alison Bechdel's autobiographic Fun Home, Craig Thompson's seeming-memoir Blankets, Harvey Pekar's tales of eclectic, everyday life, Chester Brown's libidinous confessions and Guy DeLisle's personal accounts of navigating foreign cultures all benefit from illustration's invitation to imagine the scene and its motion from a stylized depiction. This distances the writer from factual detail even as it makes the story somehow more believable. If comics are the perfect vehicle for memoir, it's because they present the truth, true or not, so comically.
Jonathan Ames (he's the creator of the HBO series Bored To Death) and Dean Haspiel’s The Alcoholic takes full advantage of illustration’s ability for aggrandizement and visual parody. Cartoonist Haspiel (contributor to American Splendor) draws Ames’ sodden narrative with stylistic humor and consistent exaggeration. “A.” has razor-sharp features (that nose!), the girls he beds possess endless legs, the old appear either haggard or comic. Just picture them...
How much of Jonathan Ames is present in his fictional character Jonathan A. is open to question. Readers of Ames’ previous essays and fiction—The Extra Man, I Love You More Than You Know–-will recognize his literary personae. This story delves into sexual confusion, obsession, addiction of all kinds and the inevitable effects of guilt. Ames frames his narrative in hilarious anecdotes. He’s caught in the backseat of a car with a drunken matron, buries himself at the beach to avoid the police, pursues an elusive love, shares a sausage with Monica Lewinisky and maintains a life-long love for a devoted aunt (which may explain the drunken matron incident). His formative-years story of sexual experimentation and beer busts in the book's first several pages serves as background to his adult behavior. Some of his history is pure cliche, including one pounded path I admit to following:
Then I read Jack Kerouac, and he finished what Hunter Thompson had started. Now I had my own dream. Or, rather, I had Kerouac's dream...
"A" may not be likeable but he's totally disarming. We can't help but root for him throughout the saga. Questions about the honesty -- the reality -- of his account arise in attempts at likeability; his love for his aunt, his seeming care for his partners and friends. How can someone with such a big heart make such wrong decisions? Maybe the question answers itself.
A.’s cycle of binge and purge gives the whole thing a weary inevitability and the book’s last, full-page panel says volumes about the alcoholic’s dilemma. It’s one picture worth more than a thousand words. You don't have to be alcoholic to identify with the quandaries of life in Ames' and Haspiel's engaging collaboration.
THE CABBAGE RABBIT REVIEW OF BOOKS AND MUSIC