| Jan. 23, 2004. 10:42 AM | |||||
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BY SARAH LINN ASSOCIATED PRESS PORTLAND, Ore. — Craig Thompson wanted to write comics but it was rough going when he moved to Portland six years ago. His budget was so small, he said, he'd wait outside fast-foot restaurants until people finished, then eat food off their trays. "The first six months were harsh," says Thompson, author of the critically acclaimed, mostly autobiographical graphic novel blankets. To survive, he painted houses for a scam artist who left him with $6,000 worth of bad cheques. His bike was stolen. Four men in a grocery store parking lot assaulted him and another man. But he stayed, and found a job as a designer with Dark Horse Comics, the fourth largest U.S. publisher in the growing comic book industry. Now Thompson is part of a thriving Portland comics scene that includes journalist Joe Sacco and superhero comics writer Greg Rucka. Portland and its suburbs are home to such publishers as Dark Horse, Oni Press and Top Shelf Publications. The area is quieter than other comics hotspots like Seattle and New York. "It's a place where you can daydream," Sacco, who travels the world for his work, says. In peaceful Portland, "You can step out of your house and think while you're out on the streets." Comics have come a long way from the newspaper-print funnies once sold at drug stores and newsstands, says publisher Michael Richardson, who founded Dark Horse Comics in 1986. Underground icons Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar broke new ground for comic book subjects in the 1960s, and Art Spiegelman's Holocaust tale, Maus, brought a level of gravity to the form in 1986. These days, readers are just as likely to find graphic novels crowding bookshelves as pulpy superhero pamphlets, Richardson says. And the genre is growing. Graphic novels earned $100 million in 2002, a 33 per cent increase from the year before, when they accounted for one per cent of American book sales, according to Publishers Weekly. The soft-spoken Thompson, 28, published his first graphic novel five years ago. Goodbye, Chunky Rice is about the seagoing adventures of a lovelorn young turtle. Blankets, a 2003 Top Shelf release, explores adolescent insecurities, faith, family and first loves with delicate images of snow and sleep. The 582-page coming-of-age tale deals with such thorny subjects as molestation and growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household. "Stories I pursue I always want to be, at the risk of sounding pretentious, literary," says Thompson, who grew up in Wisconsin and whose favourite authors include Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Thompson often meshes the fantastic with the factual. His current project is the story of a love between a eunuch and a courtesan in an Arabian Nights setting. He has filled notebooks with sketches, dreams and plot details, an approach that he says helps build ties with readers. "Comics you can linger over and look at each page," he says. "You see the author's lines as if you're looking at a handwritten letter from them." Sacco takes the approach of a war correspondent, filing gritty dispatches from the front lines of human suffering. His books, which include Palestine and the Bosnian civil war journal Safe Area Gorazde, chronicle armed conflicts in a cartoonish, crosshatch-heavy style. The stories have a dark, absurdist humour, according to the 43-year-old Sacco, who studied journalism at the University of Oregon. Sacco, from the Mediterranean island of Malta, travels frequently from Portland to Europe and the Middle East, and most recently went to the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. He documents his experiences with notes, photographs and tape recordings. In the 2003 memoir The Fixer, Sacco recalls Neven, the guide he met while covering wartime Sarajevo. The book follows Sacco in 2001 as he searches for traces of his former fixer. Macho and morally ambiguous, Neven has no qualms about milking Sacco for money as he tells outrageous war stories and chaperones the younger man through a strife-torn country. The former newspaperman scoffs at the journalistic ideal of objectivity, arguing that everyone has a background, prejudices and a point of view. "Why can't we go to a journalist and say, `Tell us what you think?'" Rucka has taken a more traditional approach to comics, simultaneously writing titles for DC Comics' Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman series — the first writer to tackle such a hat trick since 1974. The task puts Rucka, 33, in a vulnerable position, given the decreasing appetite for serial, pamphlet-style comic books. Superhero comics have long attracted scorn from critics who see the genre as silly, even infantile. Rucka, a published novelist, says tales of muscle-bound, masked men and women let readers examine human struggles on a superhuman scale. "Nobody would have asked the Greeks, `Why Hercules?'" he says. Comics' growing narrative consciousness can be attributed to a changing customer base, says Richardson, the publisher. While fewer children are buying comics, teens and adults alike are turning to the medium. Comic books and graphic novels are also gaining respectability as serious art forms, thanks to such literary endeavours as Thompson's Blankets, said Top Shelf publisher Brett Warnock. "It's the golden age right now." |
