Druggy, thuggy graphic novel Luna Park tracks a slipstreaming Russian soldier through time and annihilation. A gripping but arty hardcover, Kevin Baker and Danijel Zezelj's crime-travel comic samples cultural staples as different as Alexander Pushkin, Chinatown and The Manchurian Candidate.
But Luna Park also cleverly carves out its own gang tattoo, using a potent combination of dramatic graphics and fractal narrative that skips sharply across time, history and myth without leaving readers behind. The result is one of 2009's best graphic novels.
"Time travel works particularly well in comics. You can just show it, instead of having to describe the hell out of it," said the award-winning Baker, author of historical novels like the City of Fire trilogy. Luna Park, released earlier this month, follows that visual code with poetry, balancing Baker's dense knowledge of history with Zezelj's roughened but still cinematic illustrations.
"Luna Park gave me a chance to play with history," said Baker of his first graphic novel. "But I'm just trying to hone and humanize it, to tell individual stories within its sweep. It bends me more than I bend it."
That takes flexibility, especially in comics, where writers don't have hundreds of pages to spin their webs. Baker managed to plumb the depths of history to elevate the kind of clumsy discourse often heard even in revered comic book series, keeping Luna Park literary without boring the eye-candy addicts.
"There's enough action in what is literary to keep anyone happy," he said. "But even a very visual medium does not have to be all action. Comics and the rest of our literature could benefit by drawing more from other great works, and our history."
Like the Russian gangsters and soldiers he hurls into geopolitical stratagems and bizarre love triangles, Baker has become ensnared in comics' gravitational pull. He's building on the success of Luna Park to pitch even more historical hallucinations, which bodes well for crime and speculative comics fans looking for challenging but expressive reading. History is filled with characters like Luna Park's tormented protagonist, Strelnikov.
"He's the living embodiment of the idea that people learn nothing from experience," Baker said. "And from this flows true tragedy."
For Baker, much of that tragedy has flowed through Coney Island, location of the original Luna Park amusement park. It's a perfect cultural cipher through which Baker can tackle war, immigration, vice and desire.
"Coney Island is where the world's first real amusement parks were invented, and unlike most inventions, the first were really the best, although we'd probably be horrified by them today," Baker said. "Steeplechase, Dreamland and especially Luna Park were beautiful, edgy and unsettling, with leering wolf, pig and clown heads on the walls. The architecture was Dr. Seuss dreamscape that combined obelisks and minarets with classical towers, and electrified park benches that gave you a shock if you tarried too long."
Although it was described as "manufactured fun" by its designer Frederick Thompson, Luna Park was also a free-form creative chaos that would be too wild for the 21st century, Baker said.
"It drew deeply from the collective unconscious of the America it entertained," he added. "Things just bubbled up, without even being planned."
That kind of spontaneous creation is vividly rendered in Luna Park, as Strelnikov leaps from century to century without managing to break free of his own narrative and historical roles. A historian at heart, Baker finds analogues in our own desperate attempt to extricate ourselves from geopolitical games. Like Strelnikov, we're cornered by history.
"I'm utterly depressed about our current political situation," Baker said. "The Republicans have been completely overtaken by the far right, and turned into one of the great, lunatic parties in American history. The Democrats are completely feckless. President Obama seems to have all but disappeared. And beyond ideology, many of our elected representatives in both parties seem to have simply been bought off."
Cheer up, soldier. It's not all bad news. Is it?
"We're on the verge of making potentially catastrophic decisions, or continuing our equally catastrophic drift," Baker said. "The basic element of American optimism — that we can and will adapt to meet any crisis — has been destroyed."
See Also:
- Margaret Atwood, Speculative Fiction's Apocalyptic Optimist
- The Unwritten Blurs Conspiracy, Lit Into Meaty Metafiction
- Neil Gaiman Writes a Final Love Letter to Batman
- Grant Morrison Talks Brainy Comics, Sexy Apocalypse
- Clever Comic Air Tackles Time Travel, Philosophy, Religion
- Introspective The Nobody Takes Invisible Man to Twin Peaks
