A panel from “Poe? Yuck!”, 1983 by Alberto Breccia (1919-93)
A page from Approaching Centauri by Moebius (Jean Giraud, 1938–2012)
Drew Lerman’s comic strip Snake Creek takes us into the world of best pals Roy and Dav, weirdos among weirdos in Weirdest Florida. Their adventures and misadventures are both absurdly comic and zanily tragic, calling to mind George Herriman’s Krazy Kat strips and Samuel Beckett’s pessimism, Walt Kelly’s primeval Pogo and Robert Coover’s jivetalk, all rendered in kinetic black ink four-panel doses. I’ve been a big fan of the strip for a few years now, and Lerman’s latest collection Escape from the Great American Novel is his best work to date, a fun, messy, spirited send-up of the relationship between art, nature, and commerce.
Escape from the Great American Novel is a novel in just over 150 strips, spanning the end of August, 2019 through the beginning of August, 2021. If you reflect on those dates for a minute, you might recall that we squeezed in a lot of history there. Many of the (so-called) real-life tensions of that tumultuous time bubble up (and occasionally erupt) in the zany, myth-elastic world of Snake Creek.
Things begin simply enough, with Dav seeking to reclaim his “status as a reader of books.” Our protagonist simply wants to dig in to fine literature, but news of approaching Hurricane Dorian blocks his book time. Lerman is a Miamian (a Floridian like myself), and although the world of Snake Creek reverberates with massive streaks of irreality, it is nevertheless also beholden to real-life forces of nature. Ever the slackers, Dav and Roy are ill-prepared for an impending Cat 5. Lerman lays out a comedic scene that might be familiar to anyone who’s tried to buy batteries and water and plywood at the last minute:
The early Dorian episodes of Escape usher in a critique of capitalism-as-religion, or capitalism-as-philosophy (as opposed to, say, the naked reality of exploitation both of people, animals, and natural resources). Short on capital or material, Dav and Roy concoct a plan to forge receipts, totems of capital that might ward off the angry Nature God Dorian. Lerman sneaks in a reference to the erstwhile hero of William Gaddis’s 1955 novel The Recognitions, the forger Wyatt Gwyon:
The storm passes, post-hurricane sobriety settles in, and Dav finds himself reflective: Just what is he doing with his life? And, maybe more to the point, what can he do to extend that life into immortality? His solution, immediately ridiculed by friend Roy, is to commit himself to writing The Great American Novel:
Dav’s quest takes a solipsistic turn. He plays the tortured artist, his ambition a block to his actual progress in writing The Great American Novel. Lerman satirizes the over-inflated but self-defeating ego of the artist who aspires to surpass all the great works came before him. While the pratfalls of a would-be tortured artist is not a particularly fresh subject matter, Lerman brings vitality to his depiction of Dav’s struggle against the anxiety of influence. If we enjoy mocking Dav, it’s because we understand and empathize with him. Who doesn’t want to contend with the greats?
Dav’s quest also takes a turn away from his shenanigans with Roy. The pair’s riffing has always been the heart of Snake Creek, but Lerman keeps his partners apart for much of Escape. Dav’s dive into writing (or preparing to write, or preparing to prepare to write) distract him from Roy time. Initially, Dav chugs out reams of pages in the thrill of early enterprise. His ego swells, inflated by the grandeur of his illusions:
Only a few strips later, we find Dav’s illusions deflated. “S’all trash!” he declares over the mess of his nascent manuscript. Roy tries to help Dav. Snake Creek folk are all riled up over the plans of some “ollie garx” and the people are protesting. Roy rightfully recognizes potential inspiration here. He can bring his pal back to earth. “Sum sorter politicka thing” is happening, and that might be the inspirational grist Dav needs, right? But Dav rejects him: “I do not wish to know about anything that happened on this earth.” It might be hard to change the course of earthly life with that attitude. Instead of heeding Roy’s advice, Dav falls deeper into navel-gazing, imagining his future success, and generally doing anything except writing.
Dav’s dithering with the typewriter leaves Roy loose and “roving.” An amiable fellow, Roy soon takes up with two Russian oligarchs, Lev and Igor. This nefarious pair wishes to drill for oil in Snake Creek, destroying the weird paradise for profit. They plan to use charismatic, naïve Roy as their mouthpiece, a trusted liaison to the Creek community who can convince the locals on board to “drill baby drill.”
Lerman’s satire of these “ollie garx” and their relations with Roy is riddled with great gags. The oligarchs give Roy bald eagle eggs, which he proceeds to fry up to Dav’s dismay. They take him golfing and try to get him into Ayn Rand. They explain their anti-nature views—Mother Earth isn’t a caring mother but a devouring father who must, in oh-so Freudian terms, be eliminated. (Lerman, who always sneaks literary allusions into his strips, can’t resist referencing Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying during this exchange.) In one of my favorite exchanges in Escape, the oligarchs try to explain to Roy why his main talking point to convince the Snake Creek denizens to drill should be the promise of jobs:
“But people hate jobs” — yes. And it is ideology, but you’re not stupid, reader, although the oligarchs might think you are. Their attempted seduction of sweet Roy plays out against Dav’s egotistical self-seduction into a fantasy of literary greatness in the twin threads of Escape from the Great American Novel. There are meditations on art, immortality, capitalism, and the role of our native environs. There are throwaway jokes on Harold Bloom and arguments over the better English translation of Camus’ L’Etranger. There are drones and fecal preoccupations and a nice ACAB reference; there are anarchist swamp folk and bombs! And there are puns. I hope you like puns.
The strips collected in Escape from the Great American Novel span two years that often felt in “real time” like an eternity. Many of us were separated from friends and family over these months. Lerman’s gambit, intentional or otherwise, is to keep his central characters separated, which adds real tension to a comic novel that otherwise might be a loose collection of funny riffs. As I stated before, Roy and Dav are the heart of Snake Creek, so when Lerman finally reunites them the moment is not just cathartic, it’s literarily metaphysical. For all its sardonic jags, ribald japes, and erudite allusions, Escape from the Great American Novel is in the end a sweet, even heartwarming read (Dav and Roy would find a way to mock this sentiment, I’m sure). I loved it. Highly recommended.
Escape from the Great American Novel is available in print from Radiator Comics.
From Vague Tales, 2017 by Eric Haven.
Professor of High Caliber, 1988, a portrait of Barry Hannah by Steve Brodner (b. 1954)
The portrait appeared in the 1 July 1988 issue of Esquire, accompanied by the following text:
There he stood, in front of his class at the University of Alabama, tooting on his trumpet: Barry Hannah, gonzo novelist and pseudo-jazz musician, a man possessed by more than the English language. He was playing his own brand of jazz, the kind only a tonedeaf mother could love. Pausing to wipe his brow, Hannah exclaimed, “Whew, this is some good soul!” and began to squawk again. The class grew restive. Several made a break for the door. Hannah pulled a gun out and motioned them back to their seats. “Now this,” he said, waving the gun, “is some bad soul. You guys had better learn the difference.”
Coat Check Girl by Nigel Van Wieck (b. 1947)
Conspirators, 2020 by Aaron Gilbert (b. 1979)
The Signing of the Declaration of Independence, 2022 by Sandow Birk (b. 1962)
Grown Upstalking, 1972 by Barry Flanagan (1941-2009)
In his 1992 interview with The New York Times, Cormac McCarthy said, “The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.” McCarthy’s masterpiece Blood Meridian, as many critics have noted, is made of some of the finest literature out there–the King James Bible, Moby-Dick, Dante’s Inferno, Paradise Lost, Faulkner, and Shakespeare. While Blood Meridian echoes and alludes to these authors and books thematically, structurally, and linguistically, it also owes much of its materiality to Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue.
Chamberlain, much like the Kid, Blood Meridian’s erstwhile protagonist, ran away from home as a teenager. He joined the Illinois Second Volunteer Regiment and later fought in the Mexican-American War. Confession details Chamberlain’s involvement with John Glanton’s gang of scalp-hunters. The following summary comes from the University of Virginia’s American Studies webpage—
According to Chamberlain, John Glanton was born in South Carolina and migrated to Stephen Austin’s settlement in Texas. There he fell in love with an orphan girl and was prepared to marry her. One day while he was gone, Lipan warriors raided the area scalping the elderly and the children and kidnapping the women- including Glanton’s fiancee. Glanton and the other settlers pursued and slaughtered the natives, but during the battle the women were tomahawked and scalped. Legend has it, Glanton began a series of retaliatory raids which always yielded “fresh scalps.” When Texas fought for its independence from Mexico, Glanton fought with Col. Fannin, and was one of the few to escape the slaughter of that regiment at the hands of the Mexican Gen. Urrea- the man who would eventually employ Glanton as a scalp hunter. During the Range Wars, Glanton took no side but simply assassinated individuals who had crossed him. He was banished, to no avail, by Gen. Sam Houston and fought as a “free Ranger” in the war against Mexico. Following the war he took up the Urrea’s offer of $50 per Apache scalp (with a bonus of $1000 for the scalp of the Chief Santana). Local rumor had it that Glanton always “raised the hair” of the Indians he killed and that he had a “mule load of these barbarous trophies, smoke-dried” in his hut even before he turned professional.
Chamberlain’s Confession also describes a figure named Judge Holden. Again, from U of V’s summary–
Glanton’s gang consisted of “Sonorans, Cherokee and Delaware Indians, French Canadians, Texans, Irishmen, a Negro and a full-blooded Comanche,” and when Chamberlain joined them they had gathered thirty-seven scalps and considerable losses from two recent raids (Chamberlain implies that they had just begun their careers as scalp hunters but other sources suggest that they had been engaged in the trade for sometime- regardless there is little specific documentation of their prior activities). Second in command to Glanton was a Texan- Judge Holden. In describing him, Chamberlain claimed, “a cooler blooded villain never went unhung;” Holden was well over six feet, “had a fleshy frame, [and] a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression” and was well educated in geology and mineralogy, fluent in native dialects, a good musician, and “plum centre” with a firearm. Chamberlain saw him also as a coward who would avoid equal combat if possible but would not hesitate to kill Indians or Mexicans if he had the advantage. Rumors also abounded about atrocities committed in Texas and the Cherokee nation by him under a different name. Before the gang left Frontreras, Chamberlain claims that a ten year old girl was found “foully violated and murdered” with “the mark of a large hand on her throat,” but no one ever directly accused Holden.
It’s fascinating to note how much of the Judge is already there–the pedophilia, the marksmanship, the scholarship, and, most interesting of all, the lack of hair. Confession goes on to detail the killing, scalping, raping, and raiding spree that comprises the center of Blood Meridian. Chamberlain even describes the final battle with the Yumas, an event that signals the dissolution of the Glanton gang in McCarthy’s novel.
Content aside, Chamberlain’s prose also seems to presage McCarthy’s prose. In his book Different Travelers, Different Eyes, James H. Maguire notes that, “Both venereal and martial, the gore of [Chamberlain’s] prose evokes Gothic revulsion, while his unschooled art, with its stark architectural angles and leaden, keen-edged shadows, can chill with the surreal horrors of the later Greco-Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico.” Yes, Chamberlain was an amateur painter (find his paintings throughout this post), and undoubtedly some of this imagery crept into Blood Meridian.
You can view many of Chamberlain’s paintings and read an edit of his Confession in three editions of Life magazine from 1956, digitally preserved thanks to Google Books–here’s Part I, Part II, and Part III. Many critics have pointed out that Chamberlain’s narrative, beyond its casual racism and sexism, is rife with factual and historical errors. He also apparently indulges in the habit of describing battles and other events in vivid detail, even when there was no way he could have been there. No matter. The ugly fact is that books are made out of books, after all, and if Chamberlain’s Confession traffics in re-appropriating the adventure stories of the day, at least we have Blood Meridian to show for his efforts.
[Ed. note–Biblioklept first ran this post in September of 2010.]
Girl Reading, George Clausen (1852 – 1944)
On the Way to the Doctor, 1974 by Charles W. Stewart (1915 – 2001).
Part of a series of unpublished illustrations that were to illustrate Mervyn Peake’s 1950 novel, Gormenghast. (More here.)
Dope Rider illustration, 2021 by Paul Kirchner (b. 1952). From A Fistful of Delirium.
Job, His Wife, and His Friends, c.1785 by William Blake (1757-1827)
Biblioklept 