Broken Frontier

A Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman. Sharon Rudahl. The New Press, 2007.

A Treasury of Victorian Murder: The Saga of the Bloody Benders. Rick Geary. NBM, 2007.

Baseball fans are familiar with the idea of the game-within-a-game, where a single at-bat turns into a gripping contest between pitcher and hitter, a sort of mini-game. You can imagine the fan's profound pleasure when a single game has several of these games-within-a-game. It's like winning the lottery.

Rudahl's A Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman has the same feeling to it. Unlike so many of the comic books I read, this is not one to snap up in an hour, and then forget. Rudahl introduces a level of complexity to the study of her subject that I haven't seen outside of comic anthologies, which are compiled from the contributions of multiple creators. I've never used a silly cliché like "visual feast," but in this case it's warranted. Rudahl's pencil is busy, inventive, and celebratory. The panels are richly detailed. Each page is uniquely composed, bringing all the irregularly-shaped panels in concert with each other to work as a unified whole. The entire book has a holistic feel that sucks the reader into its sensual pages.

Geary's Saga of the Bloody Benders is entirely different. You can finish it in less than an hour, and I can't imagine wanting to return to it for any reason. But what an hour! The story Geary relates is as blunt and bleak as its Kansas prairie setting. The murderers, their neighbors, and their victims are harshly portrayed, unlovely people in an ugly land. They appear on the pages like a sequence of snapshots, frozen and remote like so many of the frigid portraits of the time. Geary's intensely realized faces appear in minimally-detailed panels, the emptiness unfolding across the pages with the rhythm of a newsreel. Geary's stark and clipped story-telling technique pushes his readers away, causing us to look upon the horror from a great distance.

While reading Sharon Rudahl's A Dangerous Woman and Rick Geary's The Saga of the Bloody Benders, I was struck by the possibilities inherent in the writing of graphic histories. Like any prose history, a graphic history is an organization and presentation of past events. But the manner of presentation is quite different from prose history. The comics medium provides the historian with some extra visual tools for communicating his or her assumptions and conclusions about the meaning of the past, and the meaning of history.

What is history? Put simply, it is organized knowledge of the past. To write history, then, is to collect knowledge of past events, and present it in some organized fashion. The manner in which the historian organizes past events is telling, because her method results from her assumptions and beliefs about a whole range of questions, from what is significant, to what is right or wrong, to the bearing past events have on the present and the future, if any. The historian has questioned past events, and attempted to understand them. In the organization and presentation of past events, the historian communicates the conclusions he has drawn about their importance or meaning.

There are two commonly-held ideas about the meaning of history. Geary's work exemplifies the oldest, and perhaps the most pervasive. In this view, history is not merely an account of the past. It lies exclusively in the past. It belongs to the past. Geary's panel composition and organization clearly communicate this emphasis.

Nothing about it draws you in. There are no details in the panels to trigger an association with your own environment. The powerfully-drawn faces are ugly and alienating. There are no friendly moments. No part of this story reaches out to you. The size of the panels varies, but not the rectangular shape. The occasional round inserts add important information without interrupting the flow. The gutters are black, making each panel appear from the darkness, only to disappear into the darkness just as suddenly. The tyrannical flow marches you along, hustling you to the end, closing the door on the story as effectively as the Kansas State Historical Marker shuts the events away in a long-gone past.

Rudahl's biography of Emma Goldman exemplifies a newer sense of history, one that emerged in the Enlightenment with its sense of progress and human self-development. In this view, history is a process. It lies in the past, but is also part of the present, and even the future. Just as in Geary's history, Rudahl communicates this emphasis most clearly in her panel composition and organization.

Rudahl tells Goldman's story in chronological order, from her birth to her death as an old woman, but the presentation of the story encourages a nonlinear reading. Goldman's wildly explosive life isn't disciplined into newsreel-like panels. Instead, words and pictures riot in the pages, the panels acquiring their shapes from the demands of the events. On each of the 112 pages, the panels are harmonized into a whole, encouraging you to stop, and stay, and ponder. The emotional detail of the panels, the round intensity of faces, expressions, and bodies, evokes your feelings, challenging you to judge Goldman and her contemporaries. And as Rudahl hopes, A Dangerous Woman challenges you to think about what it means to "see more clearly, and act more bravely." (p. 115)

In Rudahl's hands, Goldman's story doesn't stay in the past. It erupts into the present, insisting on its relevance to the political challenges of the present, and the immediate dangers of the future. The difficulty in this postmodern era is that the Enlightenment view of history, as a record of achievement and promise, has met its match in a competing sense of history as a record of frustration and defeat.

Geary's sense of history is safer, perhaps, since there is no need to judge his characters, or ask yourself what you might have done.  Rudahl's idealism may surprise you in this skeptical age.  Both artists communicate their sense of history with great skill, opening new insights into the promising use of this medium for nonfiction purposes.

A cautionary side note: I don't recommend purchasing Geary's Saga of the Bloody Benders online. Be sure you get it from a comics shop or bookstore, and check it over before you buy it. My copy has two blank pages right at the climax of the story. I'll never know if "Ma" and Kate were caught.