Graphic+Novel+Analysis

As the genre of graphic novels begins to grow we see that more and more serious topics are being shown and expressed in this art form. Jonathan Ames’ first graphic novel The Alcoholic chronicles the life of an alcoholic writer named Jonathan A. The novel starts with the main character passed out drunk in a station wagon with an elderly woman. The first line clearly states, “My name is Jonathan A. I’m an alcoholic.” He then recounts how he got to that position in the car with the woman by recalling how he first started drinking. He flashbacks to when he was fifteen years old and used to get drunk every weekend with his best friend Sal. They drink every weekend and Sal constantly takes care of Jonathan every time he gets sick. They have a homosexual experience together in Sal’s bed and vow to never speak of it. They remain friends and still continue to get drunk every weekend while Jonathan begins to take an interest in writing. Jonathan then loses his virginity to a younger girl in Sal’s bed but doesn’t perform well. The girl later cheats on him and breaks his heart, the first of many failed romances in the novel. Sal and Jonathan’s relationship soon begins to strain and Jonathan suffers another emotional blow. Jonathan then goes off to Yale for college where he studies English. The narrative then goes back to present day with Jonathan running away from the police and hiding under sand on a beach. It flashes back to that morning where Jonathan sees the woman he was in love with together with another, much younger, man. Emotionally distressed he goes on a drink binge and ends up in the old lady’s car. He then flips the narrative backwards again towards his college years where he states he drank a lot and read a lot of Hemmingway inspiring him to get into a lot of fights. He graduates school then begins to work for a library and drive a cab at nights while writing on the side. He settles into his life then suddenly his parents are killed in a car crash. This causes him to become self-destructive. He begins to build a closer relationship to his Great-Aunt Sadie who encourages him to go to France. There he meets a French girl with whom he begins a sexual relationship and smokes a lot of hash. Upon his return he begins to drive a cab again. He meets a drug dealer who introduces him to cocaine and has another homosexual experience. After waking up after the coke binge in a trashcan he enters himself into rehab. There he falls for his therapist and befriends an old man who lost everything to his alcoholism. After leaving he learns that Sal has moved to New York so he goes to see him. Sal admitted his love for Jon and they both made amends. However, their friendship does not last. Jon begins to write mystery novels with the main character being his ideal self. He almost loses his Great-Aunt Sadie to breast cancer and recalls his childhood with her which was full of love. At thirty-sex he falls in love with a much younger girl at a party and they begin a relationship. He becomes infatuated with her and he has great sex for the first time in his life. However, after 9-months she moves to San Francisco leaving him distraught. They have an up-down relationship until she catches him with another woman he used to get over her. He eventually becomes exceedingly self-conscious and does drastic things such as shaving his head. He returns back to alcoholism and starts to do cocaine with his drug-dealer friend. His friend is an ex-con who works as a bartender named Bill. The night before September 11th Jon goes on a coke binge. The morning off the attacks he sees them from his apartment rooftop and in a fit of guilt goes to donate blood which he then will be laced with cocaine. However, he later realizes that his neighbor had lost her husband. He takes her to where they think the morgue is and over the next few weeks lives with guilt. His spirits are brought up when he meet former President Clinton. Also, he finds an old friend from high school died in the attacks from a girl he used to school with. He calls her only to find out Sal has AIDS and is dying. He again goes on a cocaine and drinking binge. He lands a small job teaching at an all-girls school and gets fired after a few days when it’s found out he drank with girls and may have had sexual relations with a few of them. He meets Monika Lewinsky and goes on another cocaine binge. He then lands a job that takes him to the Grenadine Islands to write about them for a men’s magazine. There he indulges and has a near death experience. He comes back to claim he is never drinking again. The book ends in him going into a bar for Happy Hour, finally explaining how he ended up with the old lady in her station wagon at the beginning. The author is very vigilant in depicting the main character as a version of him, an alter ego even. It is unclear whether or not if anything depicted in the novel are actually things that happened to him or a mix or fiction and reality. Regardless, the story focuses on a character that goes by almost identical name as the author as well as appearance (Appendix A/B), profession and vices. The novel is very dark themed and dealing with a lot of death, near death experiences, heartbreak, sexual misfortunes, sexual confusion, embarrassing bodily functions and alcohol and hard drug abuse. It is gritty, honest and keeps the readers attention until the very end. To begin, the art in the novel is very linear and angular. It has a film-noir feel to it that is consistent with the authors other works. All drawing is done with thick black outlining. The lines are firm and there is nothing incredibly detailed in the background. The art is all in grey-scale that coincides with the dark themes explored in the novel. Shading is done with limited shades of grey only to portray shadows. (Appendix C) Character faces are not overly abstract containing personal detailing which is closer towards realism. Ames defines the main character as being another version of him by giving him the same appearance as himself. The defining characteristics of Jonathan A. are that he has a larger set “hooked” nose and as he ages he loses more and more hair. Comparing his entire physique with his character it is obvious that he got every detail clearly to his artist, right down to the exact locations of his chest hair. (Appendix A) Jonathan A’s clothing after high school remains the same collared shirt and trouser set. The high school period in the novel does not last very long but it is the foundations to his destructive behavior. This could represent his lack of change or growth from the time that he starts drinking. Jonathan A. remains the same personality throughout the novel after his friendship with Sal ends except he sinks deeper and deeper into his desire to self-destruct. This continuous progression towards deeper alcoholism and drug abuse can also been seen in his loss of hair with age and with new stressors. He is a hopeless and naïve romantic which often leaves him heartbroken, this is expressed artistically in the form of his graphic sexual experiences being full of misfortune and women leaving him in tears. Furthermore, female love interests in the novel all look the same except with differences hair color and style. They are slim bodied with large breasts and wide hips. This maybe to symbolize that they all played similar roles in his life, however, they are different entities. Also, it could represent his preference in women sexually and also, his fear of change. The artwork on is somewhere between Realism and the center of the Picture Plane. The artist captures a lot of realistic features while mixing them in with generalized and more abstract looks for characters other than Great Aunt Sadie and Jonathan. Rarely in the art we see small details such as braces and texture, however, this is uncommon. For Aunt Sadie, her wrinkles are captured and so is her frailness of age. She is also made different than all other women in the novel, as she’s the person he keeps a healthy and loving relationship with. Furthermore, in the artwork the background is usually less important than the actual experience Jonathan A is feeling. We get a lot of panels that focus in on his facial expression and then also a lot that show the effects of his behavior in large-scale focus. (Appendix D) The reader can relate to him via his facial expression because they show the exact emotion he is feeling at the time with no inhibition. The character does not hide how he is feeling; he is constantly fully exposed emotionally. The art captures the dark mood and feel of this graphic novel by employing a lack of background complexity as well. This helps because it ensures the visuals don’t take away from Jonathan’s personal experiences. The panels are large and most of the panels are usually taken up by or focused a character’s presence or experience. There are often four or five panels per page and the story is moderately paced. Ames uses a lot of small stories or events from different time frames within a story to give the effect of recounting his whole life. When the Jonathan is drinking or engaging drug use there is a mood set by the shading and the settings. The comic is American and reads left to right and up to down. The transitions in the novel are mostly action-to-action with occasional scene-to-scene and subject-to-subject panels. The novel seems to divided into small stories that focus on Jonathan A’s triggers towards his alcoholism, drug use and his emotional dilemmas. Some pages look at panels that carry out over a few drink binges probably to highlight his lack of perspective on his own life. On occasion the panels take over a whole page individually. These “bleeds” pages usually occur when Jonathan is doing something extremely bad, like having a drunken, semi-naked pillow fight with his 15-year-old students. It gives the reader a sense of extended time and sets the mood. In this case, the mood is made awkward because he is enjoying something that most people would deem completely unethical and that is taking sexual advantage of his under-aged students. Another time the artist uses a bleed is when the World Trade Center is attacked showing the reader the importance of that event to the character and offering the proper respect by giving it individual importance. The final panel is a large bleed where it is shown that Jonathan is looking at the bar and considering going in for Happy Hour. This final panel shows that timelessness of his actions. It shows his refusal to change his ways and further amplifies his addiction and how its not cured by the end. In the novel Jonathan’s self destructive behavior is not resolved and the reader has to accept that he will not change. However, this is what makes the character loveable and relatable, he is a real anti-hero and an honest rebel. He doesn’t full understand what he is doing and it is made obvious in the lack of consistency in his actions. He behaves impulsively like a child and the prose is simple to amplify his immature behavior. The character has depth and realizes he has a problem but would rather sink deeper into despair. If we look at his comic from the Six Steps of creation outlined by McCloud we can see that it focuses heavily on the Idea/Purpose and the art is just a tool to express the story of this raging alcoholic. The art is not overly sophisticated and is not the reason for the creation of the graphic novel. Jonathan Ames wrote the novel however; he left all the art to Marvel comic artist Dean Haspiel. The idea for the novel existed before the actual artistic concept was ever created. Furthermore, the storytelling in the novel is the focus rather than the beauty of the art or being revolutionary artistically. The art basically follows with story; being gritty and dark as the tales it is supposed to enhance. Ames keeps his identity and artistic integrity in the novel because he keeps the theme, story telling style and mood the same as his other works. It is a style very unique to him where he plays on “exposing himself” and enjoys expressing the main character as a version of himself (entirely real or fictional, the reader will never know). There is an originality to the piece that comes from the style Ames constantly uses for all of his works including his films, television programs (Bored to Death on HBO, 2009), and his literary work (The Extra Man, 1998). The constant themes of alcohol, drug abuse, lost love, emotional turmoil, sexual misfortune and bad decision-making are not uniquely explored by Ames. However, the honest, personal and raw perspective he explores these themes with is what makes his work fascinating to readers and viewers. Thus making his graphic novel debut different, witty and original.

Appendix A:

Jonathan A from The Alcoholic, Jonathan Ames, Art by: Dean Haspiel (2008)

Appendix B:

Jonathan Ames (courtesy of: http://www.tdbimg.com)

Appendix C: Jonathan A from The Alcoholic, Jonathan Ames, Art by: Dean Haspiel (2008) Appendix D:

Jonathan A from The Alcoholic, Jonathan Ames, Art by: Dean Haspiel (2008)

Bibliography Ames, Jonathan. The Alcoholic. New York: DC Comics, 2008. Print. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisable Art. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Print.