CHRISTMAS COMICS REVIEW: LON CHANEY SPEAKS

LON CHANEY SPEAKS
BY PAT DORIAN
(PENGUIN)

review by BK Munn

From "Lon Chaney Speaks" by Pat Dorian, a more-or-less straight bio of the great silent film actor (Phantom of the Opera, Hunchback of Notre Dame) told in comics form. I picked up the book because of its striking cover, thinking for a minute it was the work of the cartoonist Seth. Dorian's style only has a surface similarity to Seth, and reads like Syd Hoff or some other 1930s cartoonist dashed this off. It was one of the few graphic novels I managed to read in 2020, perhaps because of its brevity and simple style, and looking back on my comics reading here at the end of the year, I remembered it has this Christmas-themed sequence that neatly encapsulates the tragic aspect of Chaney's fame and is representative of the book as a whole.

Comics in Film: Robert Crumb's "Despair" in Smithereens

by BK Munn

Comics in Film: Smithereens (1982). 

Billy reads a copy of Robert Crumb's Despair while his romantically-linked bedmates, manic pixie punk girl Wren (Susan Berman) and washed-up rocker Eric (Richard Hell) argue. Even though the girls are crazy for him, Eric is so broke he has to live in a shitty apartment with Billy, a dumb loser who no girl is dumb enough to hook up with. Billy is so dumb he reads only comic books, like this classic existential Underground Comic from 1969, one of many cultural signifiers in the film, set in the blighted NYC of the day, for the ennui and emptiness of the scene and the lack of options for young people, especially young women.