By David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger & Marguerite van Cook (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-614-0
Every so often an outsider dabbles in the comics medium and brings something new to the tried-and-trusted mix which forces insiders to re-evaluate the way and the why of their preferred medium. Such a case was the collaboration between iconoclastic multi-media artist David Wojnarowicz, cartoonist and occasional comics pro James Romberger and painter Marguerite van Cook.
During the 1980s and until his death in 1992 Wojnarowicz was a public fireball: a restless and prolific author, poet, musician, painter, filmmaker, photographer, performance artist, advocate for Artist’s Rights, anti-censorship champion and political activist, driven and inspired to constantly create by his appallingly deprived and corrupted younger days as a teen runaway, street prostitute and AIDS sufferer.
Linked by surreal and iconic visual observations, the visual thesis consists of three interlinked episodes from the author’s life, threaded and embellished with reminiscences, observations, dreams and poetry to form a discourse with the world which made Wojnarowicz the compulsive, questing, wonderingly politicised rebel that he was.
With ‘Thirst’, we follow a worldly-wise, street-smart kid as he dodges Vice Cops and cruises for “Johns†on the 1970’s hustling, bustling corners of 42nd Street, before encountering just one more sad guy in search of negotiable warmth and temporary affection…
‘Stray Dogs’ takes place some years later as David and his latest dangerous boyfriend Willy struggle to feed themselves and trawl the soup kitchens, halfway houses and shelters in search of food and a safe place to sleep. Their nightmare journey through the dregs and gutters of the city would enrage a saint and make the Devil weep…
The disturbingly forensic inner narrative ends with a contemplative and breathtakingly introspective marshalling of ideas and experiences in the eponymous fantasy masterpiece ‘Seven Miles a Second’ (“the minimum velocity necessary to escape the gravitational pull of the Earthâ€). This explosively excessive tour of culture’s conjoined imagination was begun during Wojnarowicz’s final months and left uncompleted until Romberger, himself a renowned cartoonist and exhibition artist – particularly in his scenes of urban and inner city life – returned to the author’s incomplete notes and his own memories of the man to pull everything together.
This final painfully intense and intimate graphic narrative was initiated in 1989 and only completed after Wojnarowicz died from AIDS-related complications. The collaboration was posthumously released in 1996 as a Vertigo Prestige Format Publication – a slim 64-page comicbook-sized album which became a cult classic of the newborn “Literary Comics†movement.
Wojnarowicz’s lost masterpiece of graphic narrative has now been rescued by Fantagraphics: re-mastered, extended, expanded, augmented and repackaged in a lavish hardback oversized (298x229mm) edition that magnificently gifts this telling testament with the physical gravitas and presence it always deserved.
Illustrator Romberger and his wife Van Cook – whose original watercolour hues have been lovingly restored for this edition – have also included five new pages distilled from their intimate knowledge of Wojnarowicz for this breathtakingly evocative, challenging, terrifying, hallucinogenic, appallingly revelatory condemnation of a society that happily eats its weak and different,
Hard to take, frighteningly beautiful and staggeringly honest, this is a book that will – and must – upset all the right people, but is one that no mature, clear thinking devotee of graphic narrative should miss.
© 2012 James Romberger, Marguerite Van Cook and the Estate of David Wojnarowicz. This Edition © 2012 Fantagraphics Books, Inc. All rights reserved.