Time Out (London)
Review of Howl: A Graphic Novel
Book of the Week
✫✫✫✫✫
by Chris Moss
December 2010
Many people know the opening lines to Part I of Allen Ginsberg’s seminal 1956 poem, but I prefer the lines that open Part II:
- What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
This lament for the minds of the Beats, their hippy friends, gays, Jews, poets, left-wingers (Ginsberg was all these things) lays the blame for the soul-carnage of modern America firmly at the door of New York’s skyscrapers. In an age when everyone—especially Londoners—seems to fetishise the world capital of greed, there's something salutary about this architectural theory of morality. In a short inside flap that serves as a preface to this stunning collaborative masterpiece, Ginsberg praises artist Eric Drooker's skill at giving visual form to his protest-call: "Moloch whose buildings are judgment" (Moloch being his poetic name for industrial society).
"Howl" is a free-flowing, consciousness-streaming, spleen-spilling beauty, and doesn't need graphic support, but Drooker, best known for his agit-prop posters and flyers and black-and-white woodcut-inspired paintings, gives the poem what it deserves: poetic pictures. The sun never rises on these pages, bodies shine incandescent or burn up to become skeletons, sharp-edged people float through a blurred gothic reality and come together to take drugs and make love. It's Happy Feet meets Hustler meets Batman.
The voices of "Howl" are multiple: jazz, rant, sermon, confession, oration, proto-rock lyric. The motifs—nakedness, darkness, sex—bind them all together. One further motif—close-ups of typewriter-striking heads—reminds you of the writing process behind the poem, of the power of the word for the most passionate members of the pre-Elvis, pre-Woodstock generation.
Ginsberg's poem damns and spits on oil and banks and builders and academe and prejudice and family and electric-shock treatment and . . . the "and" goes on and on. The narrator reminds us that his depression reminds him of the Depression, and it is fitting that this new version should appear when America is once again desperate and confused and bitter—and yet beholden to Moloch. You can read "Howl" in a 20-minute tube, train or bus ride, and still have time to look at the wondrous pictures. If you opt for some Molochite freesheet scraped off the floor then you deserve all the crap that will happen to you. That's what Ginsberg says in his best poem.
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