Alaska Employment Law

The Alcoholic, by Jonathan Ames with illustration by Dean Haspiel, is an enormously effective and quite serious graphic novel about the tribulations and growth of the character Jonathan A., a name that suggests that the book is semi-autobiographical.  It’s told in a sort of memoir style.  Jonathan has issues with isolation, with alienation, with his relationships, and with his sense that it’s all meaningless, and he usually attempts to solve his problems with drink and drugs.  He lives through 9-11.  Yet, he soldiers on, still looking for goodness and finding it in odd places, including in his relationship with his great aunt in New York City.  Much praise to the crisp and highly emotive drawings of Dean Haspiel, who has supplied the art for another great graphic series, which I will get to in a moment.  One word of caution:  this is really a “graphic” graphic novel.  It pulls no punches.  I recommend it.

Dean Haspiel has also collaborated with Harvey Pekar, who writes the storyline for the American Splendor comics, which I have not read in a while but recall fondly.  Mr. Pekar does not live a splendid life (he’s from Cleveland, and he writes about Cleveland), but he reveals it, with all its numbing familiarities to ours, in the American Splendor books.  The way to read Harvey Pekar so to buy American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar, a double anthology with illustrations by, among others, the redoubtable Robert Crumb.  Highly recommended.  (Mr. Pekar’s tales were also made into a fine film.)

After all this brutalism, I thought okay, time to read some Charles Bukowski, whose books I had never gone near.  So I read Post Office, and I hated it.  Yes, working at the Post Office is numbing, and it’s a job full of petty administrators and even pettier rules (I worked at the Post Office in 1966 and 1967, and I still remember).  But I can hardly think of a less introspective writer than Bukowski, whose life seems to be motivated solely by booze, dope, money, and sex.  Many readers of Bukowski’s novels claim to find them funny.  Ha. Ha.