Review: 'James Sturm's America'

James Sturm's America

God, Gold and Golems


Comic art has come a long, long way during the past few years, as most Chronicle readers know - whether they applaud or wince at the new visual reality.

Newspaper comic strips have been around for more than a century, of course, and long since proclaimed a distinctly American art form. Comic books emerged 70 years ago. But something new and remarkable happened in Berkeley and San Francisco from the end of the 1960s to the middle 1970s, and we are only now seeing the implications play out in some of the most remarkable books of our time.

Comics, at least the avant-garde variety, suddenly stopped being censored for politics or sex, and with the same logic, ceased being created only for preadolescent and adolescent readers. These breakthroughs foreshadowed others over several decades and led to a vernacular postmodernism - art never intended for museum walls. (Ironically, museum shows of comics history now garner serious critical praise.) Meanwhile, the graphic novel has skyrocketed in sales and respect.

Cut to James Sturm, born in 1965. Not only does he represent a 21st century comic art reality, but he is also shaping that reality himself. His mini-academy, the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vt., is turning out the newest prospects.

Sturm was a college newspaper cartoonist in countercultural Madison, Wis., then a production assistant at the first European-style comics publication produced on this side of the ocean, Art Spiegelman's Raw magazine. Sturm is not a particularly political person, and this sets him apart from the underground generation as well as mainstream survivors of the 1970s, such as Bill Griffith and Garry Trudeau. What interests Sturm most is the art form and its uses to tell very specific stories in which historical fiction and nonfiction merge.

"The Golem's Mighty Swing," a comic novelette included in his new volume, "James Sturm's America: God, Gold and Golems," is doubtless Sturm's magnum opus - at least so far. It first appeared several years ago, bound separately, but achieves here its proper context.

The story is pure 1920s Americana, the era of traveling baseball teams playing locals for personal glory and a little cash. Few of the players will ever make the majors. Most certainly not the superb nonwhite athletes.

Our protagonists, the bearded Stars of David, offer one example of these low-cost operations. They are up-front Jews in a nation where anti-Semitism was open and aggressive, where the KKK held power in at least a half dozen states and where not even a Catholic could be elected president. The Stars have only one real star: a huge, veteran black hitter passing as Jewish. At the urging of an enterprising PR man, he becomes the Golem.

What's most interesting here is hardly the story, though well told and realistic, but the art. The people and the industrial small-town setting are captured with a starkness that recalls the 1930s-'50s Canada drawn by the acclaimed comic artist Seth, whose work appeared serially in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. One could call it flat, but that would mistake affect for intention. Sturm, like Seth, mostly avoids melodrama, even amid violence.

Well, not always.

"The Revival" and "Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight" offer lesser looks at the American 1830s and 1890s, respectively, frontier tales of deluded faith and of greed that lead to assorted grotesqueries. There are victims here, no heroes, and death is an ever-present shadow driving the actors beyond the bounds of what we hope to call civilization.

Living in highly stressful conditions of geographical and social uncertainties, having perhaps convinced themselves that migrating west would bring them to an earthly paradise, they panic or turn brutal at the emerging reality. No one would claim that this is the whole story, of course, but social historians in recent decades have not shied away from the darker side of the frontier experience.

Were they about to create an unprecedented prosperity, at least for their own descendants, out of the resources newly at hand? Yes, but the cost is still being calculated. Without a shred of didacticism, Sturm is perhaps political despite himself, but not on any map of left and right. Like every fine artist, he has created his own world out of ours.

Sturm is one of those who, like Joe Sacco, Peter Kuper, Marjane Satrapi and 1960s veterans such as Spain Rodriguez, are at long last succeeding in bringing a large movement in popular art front and center. For that, they deserve great credit - with a tip of the hat to the Bay Area, where so much of that movement took a historic leap forward.