Cartooning the canon

R. Sikoryak’s Masterpiece Comics boils
high-brow literature down to its essence.
Plus: the latest from Nick Cave

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG
and SACHA JACKSON

Masterpiece Comics

In The New Yorker magazine, underground comix pioneer R. Crumb recently previewed his forthcoming Bible-as-graphic-novel project with a fairly straightforward adaptation of the Book of Genesis—but he’s not the first comic-crafting “R.” to tackle that introductory yarn from the Western world’s favourite work of fiction. New York City cartoonist R. Sikoryak did so a few years back and took it a step further—he retold the tale using the characters and style of Chic Young’s Sunday-paper staple, Blondie.

Sikoryak has been developing a clever conceit for some years now, often showcasing it during the Carousel comic slideshow readings he curates. He takes a venerated work of highbrow literature, distills it down to its essence and retells it using popular comic-book characters, mimicking the tics and techniques of the original artists. These efforts are now gathered in the collection Masterpiece Comics from Drawn & Quarterly.

Sikoryak’s saddled himself with a two-fold task. On the one hand, he has to reduce famous works by Shakespeare, Camus, Dante, Voltaire and such to their barest components without losing the gist, going for greater minimalism than even Coles Notes. On the other, he has to imitate the inking style, the compositional quirks, even the very lettering of widely recognized comic artists like Jim Davis (Garfield becomes Goethe’s Faust) or Charles Schulz (good ol’ Charlie Brown becomes Kafka’s hapless, miserable Gregor Samsa).

Like a lot of interesting notions in humour, Sikoryak’s adaptations work best when they’re short and sweet. The momentum is soon lost in the 14-page, EC horror-comic-style version of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, a centrepiece of the book. Sikoryak fumbles the reduction of the narrative and moreover fails to capture the ragged energy of EC artist Jack Davis. More successful are his fusing of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment with Batman—the original one by Bob Kane, whose work betrayed all manner of emotional pathology—and a real charmer, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, for which Sikoryak brilliantly simulates the tone and structure of Winsor McCay’s classic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. (RB)

The Death of Bunny Munro

On the Grinderman track “No Pussy Blues,” Nick Cave sings about a man and the hoops he’s jumped through in a (failed) attempt to get one woman into bed. In his second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, Cave’s title character treads the same waters, though Munro’s problems are decidedly opposite.

Bunny Munro is a sex-obsessed door-to-door salesman, hawking beauty products to women in tower blocks and semi-detached houses all over Brighton, England. At the start, he comes across as predatory and slick, more heat-seeking missile than seducer, but as the story progresses, Munro’s sexual appetite becomes increasingly dark and sociopathic.

The wire that trips these changes comes early on when Munro returns home to find his wife dead and his nine-year-old son, Bunny Junior, wandering the apartment in a zombie-like state in oversized slippers. Dragging Junior behind him, Munro sets out for the open road (though they barely leave city limits), continuing his daily rounds and dalliances sleeping in cheap motels and becoming increasingly disconnected from his son and his own existence.

Despite the sex addiction and the frequent fantasies involving Kylie Minogue and Avril Lavigne, the bulk of the story is about the relationship between father and son and how quickly and subtly the power dynamic between the two can shift. It’s the character of Bunny Junior, constantly flip-flopping his feet and rubbing his enflamed eyes, that grounds the novel and lets Cave add depth to a work that could otherwise be called Too Much Pussy Blues. (SJ)

MASTERPIECE COMICS BY R. SIKORYAK,
DRAWN & QUARTERLY,
HC., 64 PP., $24.95
THE DEATH OF BUNNY MUNRO BY NICK
CAVE, HARPER COLLINS,
PB., 278 PP., $29.95