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Notes for a War Story by Gipi

The history of the comic book medium is filled with lots of serviceable work sharing space with lots of dreck and, slipped in there, a portion of creators whose work ranks up with the best in any medium that relies on storytelling as its center. Even higher still are those who create new ways to use the language in order to tell these stories — it could be argued, in fact, they created languages of their own in doing so. Will Eisner, Chris Ware and Robert Crumb are three of the more obvious, singular examples of this kind of visionary creating and, certainly, there are others.

I would add to the short list Italian cartoonist Gipi.

In his recently translated book “Notes for a War Story,” Gipi’s talents are on parade. On surface, this is a story of three ne’er-do-wells coping with war, surviving as best they can through a life of crime. In the hands of, say, Frank Miller, this story would be a posturing noir exercise, brimming with manhood and violence and, as a result, shallow. Gipi, however, seems devoid of the kind of strutting that accompanies so many gritty comic tales — instead, he seeks to expose the tenderness of his killers, discover the wounds of their work. Gipi’s delinquents are only out to prove things to themselves — to the reader, there is no hiding the people underneath. Posturing will not obscure the truth — heroes don’t exist because the pretense isn’t remotely possible.

Washed in a depressing greenish gray, Gipi’s landscape is that of an unnamed and war-ravaged country, disintegrating before his protagonists’ eyes. Three boys — not much different from the goofballs in his other novel from First Second Books, “Garage Band” — move from vagrancy and black market failure to low level mob jobs, slinking through the destruction as they collect money for a sleazy lone shark for whom the war is the best business venture to happen.

Through Gipi’s eyes and pen, the graphic novel echoes the films of Roberto Rossellini — it’s a neo-realist comic book, so much so that, in the tradition of that form, it’s as if the characters in it aren’t professional comic book characters all, but real people hired in the stead of those who were trained to do this. That’s a pretty unusual quality for a work of printed fiction to have — and it takes an unusually skilled creator to master such a sleight of hand — but if you imagine yourself in a movie house in the early 1960s, the smoke from people’s cigarettes curling up to the projector’s beam, then the pages of “Notes for a War Story” transport onto that very screen with great ease.

Garage Band by Gipi and The Professor’s Daughter by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert

One of the most amusing — and common — ironies of teenage rebellion is that its survival is often contingent on the patronage of those against whom the fight for independence is waged — that is, the parents of the rebel. Two recent graphic novels from France explore this dynamic from the rebellious child’s point of view, all the while being admirably straightforward about the parent’s role in this action. In “Garage Band,” a more typical situation is presented — four goofs get together for a band in order to thrash out noise and all their troubles. In “The Professor’s Daughter,” forbidden love is taken to an absurdist level, as the daughter of a prominent Egyptologist falls in love with a mummy he has discovered — a relationship he most emphatically refuses to endorse.

“Garage Band” is the work of Italian comics creator Gipi, whose gorgeous watercolors provide an animated grit to the world of Giuliano and his friends, who hold band practice in a decrepit old garage provide by Giuliano’s dad.

“The room’s mine as long as I stay out of trouble,” Giuliano explains.

The garage is not a longterm vote of confidence, it’s only a temporary gift from a father who spends more time with his champion show dogs than his child. The idea is that they will earn the rehearsal space, cleaning up the rat poop and clutter and dirt and through self-reliance build themselves up as they build their musical hideaway.

Like so many bands whose performing careers are played out in garages, this one is born of forging their own identity — even though dad owns their soul searching space. The other members are also beholden to parents — Nazi memorabilia collector Alex depends on his mother and aunt to help him transport equipment out, while troublemaker Stefano begrudgingly accepts his father’s overtures to set the band up with a client of his who is in the record industry.

An effort to be self-reliant turns into a bungled disaster for the band that has them on the verge of losing everything — Giuliano breaks his father’s one rule, while Stefano faces a temptation that forces him to choose between integrity and success. By the end of the story, it seems as though the support of parents — even the worst ones — are crucial to following your own rebellious muse and what Gipi illustrates is the process that everyone must go through in order to take that double-edged sword of a gift and put it to the best use.

“The Professor’s Daughter” is the effort of French creative team Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert, who trade off duties in their works — in this book, Sfar scripts and Guibert illustrates in watercolor. This rebellion is one entrenched in a Victorian setting and surrounded by the sort of frantic, authoritarian squabbling that is indicative of the time. Professor Boswell feels he is showing proper parental affection toward his daughter, Lillian, but she feels at arm’s length from his heart.

“I sometimes feel like I’m a possession of his,” Lillian complains, “one of those antiques he goes searching for in the far corners of the world.”

“I do know the feeling,” the mummy wryly responds.

Though previously linked through meaningful conversation and one happy jaunt to a teahouse, Lillian and Imhotep IV become even more bonded through travails such as an accidental double murder, a kidnapping at sea, a stirring court case, the involvement of Queen Victoria herself and interloping by another mummy.

Lillian proves herself a plucky Victorian heroine — a direct descendant of the inhabitants of the old “penny dreadful” horror novels and the girls given life through the imaginations of the Bronte sisters. This is as much romantic comedy as Victorian potboiler, however, and Imhotep, despite being covered in bandages, is a sympathetic monster in the vein of Dracula and much more of a direct gentleman than many of his literary contemporaries.

It just takes one reading of something like “Pride and Prejudice” to see that there were smart girls in the 19th Century — and that their lot in life was not always in line with their clever brains. These women were expected to find men and the real motion of their narratives is a sparring courtship — that is, a domestic adventure — in which the men prove themselves worthy of the women. Within this marriage context, the women will rise on the power of their own strengths with their male counterparts giving them the social prominence that allows such growth to happen.

Lillian picks up half that archetype, but her choice of male — a reanimated mummy of a long-dead Egyptian pharaoh — isn’t quite as socially acceptable as a Mr. Darcy type. In the eyes of everyone, Lillian is marrying down — socially, yes, since a mummy is a belonging, but also in the area of time. A two thousand year old man is not quite within her station.

Both are burdened not only by “modern society,” but also by the sort of demanding familial responsibility that can squash even the slightest rebellion— their flight through rollicking adventures in the underbelly of 19th Century London is equal part escape from the control of their own paternal forebears. Just as the band in “Garage Band” learns to make the best of these parental intrusions and use them to their advantage, so do Lillian and Imhotep. It is a more practical form of biting the hand that feeds you and a truth any of us could have used, though only some of us have had the good fortune to have in our arsenal.

The creators in these books utilize the graphic format with a mixture of scrappiness and maturity — these are adults who haven’t lost that feeling of being young, but can also apply the lessons they have learned to the tales of those days left behind. In this way, Europe has been miles ahead of our own country in their approach to the graphic story telling — while we have largely relegated the format to male-oriented genre tales geared towards adventure and action and delivered in a disposable monthly form, the Europeans have been publishing diverse works in book form for decades.

“Garage Band” and “The Professor’s Daughter” represent ways in which we are finally catching up to the possibilities that French and Italian creators have been offering for years through their work. Just the fact that books such as these are finally being published in our country and made available to teens — heck, you can find these in local libraries — shows that we are finally maturing in our appreciation of the medium.