Seven Comics About Disintegrating Families: A Thanksgiving Special

Just in time for your triumphant return to mother’s house, The Faster Times presents seven comics/graphic novels/trade paperbacks about families in the midst of complete disintegration.

Asterios Polyp

Writer/Illustrator: David Mazzucchelli

Type: Graphic novel

To describe Asterios Polyp as a comic about a disintegrating (or disintegrated) family is pretty reductive. The book took Mazzucchelli nearly a decade to complete and the final work is continuously rewarding after second, third, and even forth reading.

On the surface, Asterios Polyp follows a former professor of architecture and divorcee (the title character) who loses the contents of his entire apartment in a fire. He embarks on a road trip, much of which is interrupted by flashbacks of his failed career and marriage. The synopsis seems pretty benign, but the point of the book isn’t entirely what it’s about, but how it’s about it. Scott McCloud and Douglas Wolk are both better at breaking down Mazzucchelli’s work than I am.

Mazzucchelli is a veteran illustrator. He’s been active since the early 80s and he’s most well-known for his work in mainstream comics; after illustrating Batman: Year One for Frank Miller, he devoted his time to more personal projects. It’s exhilarating as Mazzucchelli pushes the boundaries of what one can do with sequential storytelling. The result is a book that’s as much about the form and structure of comics as it is about love, loss, and trying (perhaps too late) to make amends.

Essex County

Writer/Illustrator: Jeff Lemire

Type: Graphic novel

Jeff Lemire is almost the opposite of David Mazzucchelli. The latter is an incredibly disciplined artist and a bit of a chameleon, able to change his style to accommodate the story. Lemire is much more limited. His artwork is scratchy and loose, bordering on crude. But it’s also moody and atmospheric; Lemire is excellent at depicting the stark Canadian farmland where the three stories contained in Essex County take place. I actually don’t think the volume would be as affecting as it is if Lemire’s art had more polish, if he didn’t have such thick brushwork and opted instead for a tighter style. The sketchiness of Lemire’s lines–and this is especially true when he draws faces–always seem to suggest some underlying tension, that the characters that inhabit his stories are on the verge of completely losing it.

The chapters were originally published as three self-contained, though connected, graphic novels (Think: Winesburg, Ohio). The first chapter follows a ten-year-old boy named Lester who, because of his mother’s illness, lives on a farm with his uncle. Their relationship is strained, mostly due to the circumstances surrounding the boy’s stay, and Lester spends his days fantasizing about superheroics until he befriends the owner of a local gas station. It’s a short, sparse story about being in circumstances that force you to grow up faster than you ordinarily would.

The second chapter is Lemire’s masterwork, charting the deterioration of the relationship between two brothers through the decades. Lemire does a lot here that’s difficult to do in a comic: he jumps around chronologically, and from one geographic locale to the next. He also illustrates some truly memorable sequences. One of the final images of the chapter, a double-page spread, continues to haunt me.

And the final chapter, though it can also be read on its own, ties everything together. It’s actually an anti-climax (the book essentially ends with a family tree), but don’t let that hold you back.

Identity Crisis

Writer: Brad Meltzer

Penciller: Rags Morales

Inker: Michael Bair

Type: Trade paperback, originally published in single magazine form as Identity Crisis 1-7

Identity Crisis is the most controversial book on this list, which you probably wouldn’t expect because it’s a superhero story featuring Superman, Batman, and Green Arrow. Also, it centers around a third-tier character named Elongated Man, whose only superpower is that he’s stretchy. Kind of hard to court controversy if that’s all you do.

But the book opens with the violent murder of Elongated Man’s wife. That, followed by a subsequent revelation, pretty much reignited the whole Women-in-Refrigerators debate and with good reason. The incident that kick-starts the narrative in Identity Crisis is a horrific one, and I don’t think Meltzer handles the material particularly well; it’s primarily just a seedy little plot device to get things revved up.

That being said, I do like almost everything else in Identity Crisis. The concept is great: a murderer targets the family and friends of various superheroes. Meltzer is exceptional at showing the fraying alliances within the superhero community, especially as some choose to secretly cross a line in order to safeguard their loved ones. Brad Meltzer is a novelist, a writer of thrillers and mysteries. The tightly-plotted whodunnit aspect is the biggest strength of this book; this is unusual for mainstream superhero comics, which can be discursive and tend to focus on whether superhero X will foil supervillain Y’s evil plot Z.

Swallow Me Whole

Writer/Illustrator: Nate Powell

Type: Graphic novel

Nate Powell is probably one of the best creators at conveying his characters’ interiorities. He uses deep shadows, extreme close-ups, and irregularly-shaped word balloons filled with illegible characters to create the ominous paranoia surrounding the two siblings in Swallow Me Whole. Ruth suffers from OCD and communicates with insect armies; Perry battles the onset of childhood schizophrenia, which manifests as a wizard commanding him to draw. This description notwithstanding, Swallow Me Whole is completely devoid of whimsy and sensationalism.

Powell, who works with adults with developmental disabilities, treats Perry’s and Ruth’s afflictions matter-of-factly, as nuisances that add to the usual confusion of adolescence and the other irritations in life. Strangely, this is what gives the book its tension–that though Ruth treats her insects as another aspect of her life, and though Perry tries to ignore the wizard (which he knows isn’t ‘real’), these hallucinations will sooner or later play a much more disruptive role in the siblings’ respective lives.

In the end…well, I’m not really sure what happens in the end. The events in the narrative become ambiguous, and I’m still not certain whether this is a deficiency in Powell’s storytelling or if it was entirely a creative decision.

Three Shadows

Writer/Illustrator: Cyril Pedrosa

Type: Graphic novel

This is a sad book, a kind of nightmare allegory about parents confronted with their child’s inevitable death. In this case, death manifests as three horseback riders, who emerge one summer day by a cottage belonging to a farmer and his family. They keep reappearing, each day getting closer, until it becomes apparent that they are there to take the farmer’s young son. Out of desperation, the farmer flees with his son, and I think I’ll end the synopsis here.

Pedrosa is an excellent artist. He conveys a range of moods, tones, and settings using a few economically-placed lines or a strategic splash of ink. One of his most effective sequences is when the farmer, preparing to flee with his son, says goodbye to his wife. It’s a two-page sequence and from a visual standpoint, not much is happening. And yet Pedrosa, with only a few smudges of ink, evokes the conflicting senses of loss, resignation, and defiance that alternate through the book.

The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite

Writer: Gerard Way

Illustrator: Gabriel Ba

Type: Trade paperback, originally published in single magazine form as The Umbrella Academy 1-6

The Umbrella Academy is a superhero book, but it’s also one of the most unusual superhero books since writer Grant Morrison’s run on Doom Patrol in the 1980s (It’s not surprising then that Umbrella Academy creator Gerard Way, who’s also the lead vocalist for My Chemical Romance, was inspired by Doom Patrol). Unlike most superheros, who juggle private lives alongside their heroics, the characters in Umbrella Academy are wholly defined by their powers and the adventures that they have because of them.

The story: the estranged step-siblings that constitute the Umbrella Academy return for their guardian’s funeral. They argue, only to be confronted by Vania, the most-estranged of the siblings, and whom everybody assumed had no powers. She does, in fact, and they’re incredibly destructive.

The Umbrella Academy really isn’t about its plot; it’s about the oddities that inhabit its world and the irreverent and ironic way in which Way and Ba tell the story. There’s an annoying tendency in mainstream superhero comics to explain everything. Why does Bruce Wayne dress like a bat? Because a bat once flew through his window while he was sulking in his study. The Umbrella Academy makes no effort to explain anything. The defacto leader of the Academy, apropos of nothing, has the body of a gorilla. Their nanny is a dress form with an intestinal tract. There are talking chimps. In other words, things are weird for weirdness’s sake. And that’s refreshing in an era where there’s a tendency to ground superheroes with real-world tedium.

The Walking Dead Compendium Volume 1

Writer: Robert Kirkman

Illustrator(s): Tony Moore (issues 1-6), Charlie Adlard (issues 7-48)

Type: Hardcover collection, originally published in single magazine form as The Walking Dead 1-48.

So here’s one where the families disintegrate quite literally.

The Walking Dead is my favorite ongoing series right now, despite the fact I started reading it years after its debut. I was put off by the title, which seemed overly-descriptive and a little dull, and by the covers, which constantly featured close-ups of zombies. So I figured that the title would mostly be about survivors in a post-apocalyptic world massacring hoards of the undead. I’m into that sort of thing, but mostly in video games.

But The Walking Dead really isn’t about the zombies; it’s about the survivors who band together and the tensions that arise as they struggle to find food and shelter and as they experience death, love, and jealousies amongst each other. But now I’m making it sound like an Oscar-bait dramedy, and it’s not that either.

In a few words: this book is fucked up. It’s about people trying very hard to cling to their humanity when there’s really no reason to do so, when in fact it would be very inconvenient and possibly life-endangering to do so. And it’s also about waves of zombies who overwhelm with sheer volume and whose bite guarantees both death and the fact that the victim will eventually turn him or herself.

Writer Kirkman gives a great deal of attention to the survivors. I’ve noticed in almost all zombie epics each surviving human typically has precisely one personality trait: This man panics, That man grieves, That woman is pregnant, etc. But there’s a lot more depth to Kirkman’s characters; they don’t just shoot zombies–they also try to study them and figure out their tendencies in the hopes that that knowledge will help them survive. They develop a taxonomy, for instance, describing how some zombies have a tendency to wander whereas others are more sedentary. They note that zombies are attracted by loud noises, and when that happens, they tend to arrive in herds.

The Walking Dead is a much more detailed study on human nature than I expected from a series about lurching, moaning corpses. Throughout the series, the survivors’ personalities change and their alliances shift. Favorite characters die suddenly and often unexpectedly. And that’s what makes this series so great: events change rapidly and, when they do, the impact resonates as much with the characters in the book as with the reader.