Literatour (Luxembourg)
Review of Flood! A Novel in Pictures
By J.-M.L.
2003Eric Drooker is one of the most talented and versatile artists working in the USA today. He is a regular cover artist for the The New Yorker and a contributor to The Village Voice and World War 3 Illustrated where his cartoons and political posters have appeared. He also designs record covers, notably for Rage Against The Machine, and he is known to turn public appearances into "Gesamtkunstwerke" with projections, poetry and music, during which he accompanies himself on the harmonica. He has cooperated with the most famous of the Beat poets, the late great Allen Ginsberg, on Illuminated Poems and demonstrated his overtly leftist politics in Street Posters & Ballads. Although critics generally look upon Blood Song: A Silent Ballad as his most accomplished graphic novel, it is Flood!--the American Book Award winner--that announced his arrival on the stage of the comic book.
This "Novel in Pictures" is a member of an old tradition partly inspired by silent movies. Art Spiegelman, the author of MAUS, compares Drooker to the greatest exponents of this form of visual poetry, the Belgian Frans Masereel, who invented this wordless art, and the Americans Lynd Ward and Milt Gross. In Flood! nobody speaks, there are no typical speech bubbles and the powerful black and white drawings remind the reader of chunky Expressionist woodcuts.
The Dark Underbelly of the Metropolis
It is amazing to see how Drooker manages to tell a story that relies completely on graphics by controlling the speed with which his story advances through the dynamic intensity of his style and the variable size of his panels. In Home, the first of the three loosely connected parts of Flood!, we follow a man from his home to his job at a factory which has been closed down. The first pictures are big and crude, quite optimistic and illuminated by a gigantic, ferocious sun. But soon the rain starts falling. Unemployed, the man returns to his flat in despair and meets a woman at a bar who turns out to be a junkie prostitute. After this emotional catastrophe the nameless hero is evicted from his place and is reduced to living and begging in the streets of New York. As his "adventures" begin to repeat themselves--police, court, prison, poverty etc.--the panels become ever smaller and smaller until the page contains first 64, then 256 tiny boxes in which the human figure becomes a mere cypher, a matchstick man and eventually disappears altogether--the fate that befalls many people in the cruel world of the big city.
Although he now lives in California where there is more space and more oxygen than in Manhattan, Eric Drooker lives, breathes and dreams New York. L, the second part linking Home and Flood, introduces a young artist, who looks suspiciously like the author, adrift in the New York city underground, lost among all the anonymous people, escaping into a strange, archetypal vision. In his mind he follows dark passages into the sewer system which are decorated with well-known cave paintings that tell of long forgotten civilizations. Deep down he encounters a so-called "primitive" tribe of natives who accept him into their midst after an ancient ritual and the young man is finally free to live close to nature in a prelapsarian paradise. The policeman and his dog quickly make him realise that he is still on a New York train...
An Apocalyptic Vision of American Society
Even though Eric Drooker uses primitive symbolism and prehistoric paintings to show where his influences lie, he is of course thoroughly modern. There are not only his politics and his sympathy for the poor and the homeless, we also catch glimpses of Fred Flintstone, Mickey Mouse and the Ninja Turtles. But the society Drooker portrays in Flood! is doomed. Whenever there seems to be a ray of hope, the clouds are not far behind.
In the final part of the novel the young artist draws, but also lives, a spectacular journey beyond the rain into a celestial funfair in the sun. But as he goes from amusement arcade to circus to freak show, America's collective guilt and bloody history comes back. On the tattooed muscles of a strongman he sees the different stages of American evolution as seen from the point of view of the oppressed--the Indians, the slaves, the unemployed workers, and so on and in the end the only hope for the future seems to be a biblical flood.
Drooker introduces the colour blue to impressive effect and the final pages of Flood!--as the water is rising between the monolithic skyscrapers--are among the most moving of any comic ever. Flood! is not a funny book, but without doubt a deep, dark disturbing masterpiece!