Crickets 6

arecomicsevengood:

The new issue of Sammy Harkham’s Crickets, containing the fourth (and possibly final) chapter of Blood Of The Virgin, is a good one. Blood Of The Virgin is a comic about the making of a film with that title, an exploitation movie made on the cheap. The movie is a period piece taking place in the victorian era, the comic is a period piece taking place in the early seventies. While the comic’s subject matter makes it “feel” like a literary comic, with subject matter not far from that of a John Updike or Richard Yates novel, or Joseph Heller’s “Something Happened,” being about a man who cheats on his wife, the formal approach taken feels closer to the love of sensations people who seek out older movies love. The scenes of driving around L.A. seem like they were researched specifically to achieve the pleasure someone takes in seeing the area where they live in a movie, taken from a time before they lived there. This new issue is good scene after good scene, capturing a flow of feelings. There is none of the internal monologue that makes up the sort of novels I mentioned. It’s unspoken, one can read that sort of thing elsewhere if they want to fill in the blanks. One feels as if it’s totally possible the characters might have read these sorts of novels, just as they go to see the sort of movies they’re making. The work alluded to fills in the milieu of the character’s emotional landscape.

This issue opens with a dream sequence, a nightmare: That could come from working on, and watching, horror movies, the general anxiety of life, or be considered prophetic, prefiguring the things about to go wrong later in the narrative. It’s also a sequence of pure sensation, and good comics storytelling, and doesn’t need to be examined in a way that gives it a direct meaning.

What is being captured is this essentially masculine thing: A man who does not talk about his feelings, but is primarily working hard. He might possess ambitions, in regards to his job, but the pursuit of those, the taking opportunities when they come, means being in over his head pretty much all the time, the love he feels for the people around them is a gratitude for keeping his head above water. Working in exploitation film, and getting a series of promotions, puts him in a place roughly parallel to how he feels as a young father. This issue ends with a night spent in jail. Offered a phone call and imagining everyone he could call sleeping, several of whom probably actively resent him, he refuses. The stoic option leads to staring down an image glimpsed in the earlier dream.

This could be the final chapter of Blood Of The Virgin, it could not. When the first chapter appeared, in issue 3, it seemed like a short story. I was surprised when it continued. When collected as a graphic novel, it’ll probably read great. For now, however, I notice the particular relish Harkham takes with his title pages, following cold opens, these moments that feel like cuts to a new scene with loud music playing, each time the title is re-announced.

That title, again, is “Blood Of The Virgin,” a loud, bombastic, threat of a thing, underscoring drama. The comic, on the other hand, is simply called “Crickets,” which I read as a particular sort of sound effect, heard chirping in the background in the face of an overwhelming silence, the sort that results from an attempt to make a joke, an attempt to communicate, failing utterly.