Still, Kuper’s work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad’s language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a “soul had gone mad” for their efforts), explaining that “by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad’s text.” There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it’s hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Marlow’s trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Even the reader who hasn’t experienced such fantasies will likely know just how Doucet feels.ĭoucet’s dreamscape is an intriguing place to visit, though it might be a little scary to live there.Ĭartoonist Kuper ( Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation.Īs a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once “one of the dark places of the earth,” referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. As with Harvey Pekar’s early collaborations with Robert Crumb, she presents the work as straightforward confessions from a mundane existence, never romanticizing herself or belaboring the humor. Over the passage of years, the panels become larger and lighter, with a little more breathing room, as if the pressures on the artistic subconscious have eased a little. All of the dreams and drawings are dated, mainly from the late 1980s and early 90s (when Doucet was in her early-to-mid-20s). From menstruation to masturbation to motherhood (she births and nurses a cat), she proceeds in fearless fashion, as if she has never experienced an impulse that she feels is forbidden to illustrate and share. She crams her drawings with obsessive detail, to humorous and occasionally claustrophobic effect. Many of the strips transverse or dissolve the boundary between dreams and Doucet’s conscious state, with some of them showing her awakening to the discovery of what a weird dream she’d been having, while others reflect dreams within dreams. Penis envy (or at least obsession) informs a number of the other dreams, as one of them allows the artist with her surprising new appendage to have a different kind of fun with her girlfriends (and attract a very interested Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees). Within this journal of dreams, one strip that she titles “If I Was a Man” shows in explicit detail how she’d have sex with a woman, one who would have to have huge breasts, because Doucet would have such a large penis. Graphic narratives don’t get much more graphic than the comix of Doucet (My New York Diary, 1999). A dirty mind proves creatively liberating and socially subversive, as this Montreal native finds catharsis for her deepest fears, desires and neuroses through these drawings of her dreams.
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