Soldier Bear

by Bibi Dumon Tak

spot illustrations by Philip Hopman

translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson

Eerdmans Books edition 2011

A cgarette-eating, beer-drinking, ammunition-carrying bear? Only warfare could create a story so improbable.

During World War II as Russia and Germany fight to claim Poland for their own the citizens caught in the middle are taken as prisoners in their own country, forced to flee to neighboring Iran. Among these escaped expatriates are Stanislav and Peter, a pair of inseparable friends who agree to join the British in the fight to help reclaim their homeland. One day while stopped along the road they spy a starving young boy with nothing to trade the soldiers but a small sack containing a bear cub. A cute little bear cub, who so totally entrances Peter that he trades a pocket knife, some cash, and tin of meat for it. None of the soldiers of the 2nd Polish Corps would imagine that this cute little pet would become not just a mascot but a source of comfort and a valuable comrade in the fight.

Once weened from milk the bear they named Voytek, "smiling warrior" in Polish, quickly adapts to his surroundings and behave much like a small child in the camp. Voytek prefers to sleep with Peter instead of his little makeshift bed, he bothers the cook for scraps, and learns how to give himself showers in the heat of the Palestinian desert where they are based before moving closer to the front. When scolded or scared Voytek covers his eyes with his paws and rocks back and forth, and when the soldiers become melancholy he knows to stand on his hind legs and place a reassuring arm on a man's shoulders. Raised around men Voytek learns how to behave as a man, as much as a bear can without betraying his nature. Granted, the soldiers introduce the bear to beer, which he loves and can be bribed with, and he mimics the soldiers smoking by stealing their lit cigarettes and eating them, but he also pitches in and carries ammunition when its time to work, earning Voytek an official designation as a Private in the 2nd Polish Corps.

There is something decidedly old school about Soldier Bear, an innocent absurdity that feeds into the wartime images we have of people doing and performing extraordinary tasks in the face of adversity. The connection with nature, a bear in this case, in the face of something as unnatural as life during wartime keeps the men of the 2nd Polish Corps grounded. All around them humanity is focused on so much destruction and yet here are soldiers chasing a bear, two dogs, and a monkey that they have also adopted around the camp as they wreak havoc. And when a winter snow quiets the war it is the animals who remind the soldiers about the joys of life by frolicking and starting a snowball fight that involves the entire camp. Ironic, that the link these men have to their humanity comes from the antics of a bear who was raised by soldiers in adversity.

photo from the Polish Institute, not from the book

Written in a clean style with a deceptive simplicity, Soldier Bear has the feel of a high-interest title aimed at reluctant readers without talking down to any. As a collection of vignettes, we follow Voytek's story with the 2nd Polish Corps for the five years until the moment after the war when his minders must return home and leave their friend and comrade behind. Though the parting is bittersweet, we learn in the Afterword that Voytek lived happily in the Edinburgh Zoo for another 15 years, which isn't bad for a bear who served during the war, drank beer, and was fond of eating lit cigarettes.

In thinking about it after the fact, the story is remarkable, but completely sidesteps the moral implications of these soldiers deciding to take care of a bear cub over the boy who owned him. A bear cub in the wild without its mother probably wouldn't have survived – indeed, I suspect the only reason the boy has the cub in the first place is because something happened to the bear's mother – but what about the boy, and what of his mother? Why not take the boy as a mascot, feed him and make him an honorary soldier? Is it not entirely possible that Peter and his friends saved the bear at the expense of the boy's own life?

Nonetheless, Soldier Bear was this year's winner of the Mildred L. Batchelder Award for “the most outstanding children’s book originally published in a language other than English in a country other than the United States, and subsequently translated into English for publication in the United States.” A worthy winner, to be sure, but there is nothing "foreign" about the reading experience.

[This review is also cross-posted over at Guys Lit Wire today, your home for books of interest to guys, by some of the best bloggers in the business.]

The Arrival

Shaun Tan
Arthur A. Levine / Scholastic 2007

Okay: wow.

I have this feeling everyone is going to fall all over this book (if they haven't already) for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Tan put four years into researching and preparing this book and every minute of every day of those four years is visible on the page. In his wordless tale of the immigrant experience you get the full feeling of the stranger in an extremely strange land, where daily life requires complicated negotiations, huge adjustments, and calls to question what it means exactly to understand the cultural "other."

It's a tale of a father going abroad on his own to negotiate a new life for himself and his family, to settle in and save up enough to bring his wife and daughter to the new land of opportunity. Along the way the main character meets up with several others who have their own tales and experiences to share. It's a city of strangers, of immigrants, this new and unusual world, and all the "back homes" are shown in a variety of metaphors for all the reasons one would seek shelter in a new land. Betrayed by their homelands, stories are told of dark, mammoth tentacles flailing about the edges of the old worlds, the giants that vacuum up citizens in cleansing raids, the militaristic fascism that captures the hearts and minds of young men and exact payments in the form of life and limb. The Arrival then is nothing short of a fantastical look back at the history of the American 20th century... or a forward-looking landscape into a world we have yet to envision for ourselves.

Like The Invention of Hugo Cabret, this book is neither fish nor fowl, neither a picture book nor a graphic novel, though it more closely resembles the latter. In testimonial Art Spiegelman refers to this as "a novel told in graphics (not cartoons), a wordless story that uses the language of silent cinema." And like those early silent movies -- often created by immigrants and for the entertainment of immigrants -- the universal language is that of humanity, of people dealing with one another, sometimes harshly and sometimes humorously but always bound by the spirit of the struggle and survival that binds them together.

I said it a while back and I'll say it again: the graphic novel in children's literature needs to be recognized as a separate beast from either traditional fiction or picture books, and they require their own awards. I'm not necessarily insisting this book deserves any of the ALA awards but it is inane that a book like this could be considered along side picture books or traditional narrative fiction; Worse, it would be criminal not to consider this book worthy of those awards. The problem isn't going to go away any time soon and the longer it goes unaddressed the more problematic the situation will become.

The Graphic Novel Question

The recent arrival of the graphic novel to children's literature is a bit like Columbus discovering America; Like the North American continent, graphic novels have been there and for quite some time.

I bring this up partly in response to a post over at pixie stix kids pix that reports on the "trend" in children's literature over wordless picture books and graphic novels. All this recognition by the American Library Association and Publisher's Weekly gleefully reporting the popularity and sales of graphic novels (like movie grosses splashed across the front page as if they were actually news) , while welcome, comes a little late to the party. How late depends on how the community at large eventually comes to define the graphic novel.

By my count the party is at least 20 years late, but I may make a case for 50 years if we're all willing to stretch things a bit.

The 1980's
I think it's safe to say that the graphic novel as we are currently recognizing it is a product of changes the comic book industry during the early to mid-1980's. Attempting to shore up flagging sales the traditional comic book industry -- Marvel and DC primarily -- looked to creating high-end imprints that would be printed on coated stocks (no more tawdry newsprint) with edgier, grittier art and stories than the superhero comics of the 50's and 60's. This was when Frank Miller re-envisioned Batman as an avenger of justice in his Dark Knight series. Here was an over-buffed batman than the man-in-tights we had once known fighting like a ronin against the forces of Gotham's evil elite. Miller took the materials of Batman's past, material that had always been in the comic books, and gave it more of an adult weight, the gravitas of a person haunted into a life of secret identities and vigilantism. It's from Miller's reworking that the current spate of movie adaptations take their cues, and where young readers looking for graphic storytelling went when they outgrew the inherent silliness of the old school comics with their stilted dialog and simplistic plots.

Miller didn't invent the idea of a multi-issue story arc with traditional dramatic story structure -- it was more common than a stand-alone story, primarily to keep readers buying them -- but when the final work was finished and published in book form the full vision of what Miller had accomplished was noteworthy. Like the comic readership itself he had bumped graphic storytelling up a notch in the popular culture to an acceptable novelesque experience.

Or had he? Let's wait before we see if that statement sticks.

Around the same time Alan Moore had begun a totally original comic based on a group of superheroes driven underground by the government for causing more harm than good. (If you're having deja vu then perhaps you've seen Brad Bird's humorous riff on this idea with The Incredibles a few years back). Where Miller was reinventing a familiar character, Moore was giving us superheroes who were distinctly human. Poisoned and mutated by radiation, living in squalor or turning their previous fame into a multi-billion dollar industry, Watchmen tore apart the stereotypes of the superhero as invincible and made them humans with just that much more pathos. Again, envisioned as a complete story, The Watchmen ran in 12 installments that were titled chapters that were designed with a graphic novel as the end product. Moore would later give similar spin to his 1984-meets-Guy-Fawkes tale V for Vendetta and Victorian-feeling League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

At the same time smaller comic presses were growing, as were independently printed comics. Min-i and self-published comics were picked up by smaller presses and in turn helped build those alternative houses into an industry separate but equal to the big boys. Personal narratives were often the focus of these alternacomics. Chester Brown's Yummy Fur would tell the uncomfortable autobiographical narrative of his teen years where Playboy magazine interfered with his relationships between his female peers. Adrian Tomine told the cool, distanced tales of mopey slackers and their disfunctional stories of adjusting to young adulthood. Daniel Clowes would walk the same territory with a palpable sense of the bizarre worked in between his grotesques, though his Ghost World is the tamest example of his work. And for pure Earth-based fantasy it was hard to ignore Scott McCloud's Zot for its teen super hero and his troubles with his non-super hero girlfriend. For every artist or title I could mention there are those that could probably name ten or twenty others, equally good and mining the seam with startling originality.

It would be easy to suggest that the explosion of comics into a long-form graphic novel we now know came about as a result of this collective explosion in comics, but what if we looked back an additional 10 years, what would we find?

Will Eisner's Contract
One of the greats in the history of comics -- the Eisner Awards are named after him -- Will Eisner not only drew fame from his serialized comic adventure strip The Spirit but in 1978 took on the long-form graphic novel with adult themes and startling results. A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories is credited with being the first American graphic novel, so I guess if we really must hold to strict definitions then graphic novels in America have enjoyed a good 30 years to date. Eisner's themes are decidedly adult: One story concerns a man who's accidentally listed in the newspaper as dead and in his attempts to prove that he's still alive meets his end and proves the newspaper prescient.

Eisner's style is dark, steeped in the grit of a 1940's noir New York City. While visually rooted in mid-century America his stories of the common man trying to survive in a city-world that has left him behind still speaks volumes. His characters carry so much weight in the drawings they almost seem to be buckling under the oppression of the ink, threatening to pull the page down with them. He was a master of storytelling and visual structure and I would hope that anyone seriously considering graphic novels as a literary medium read his book on the subject Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative (in addition to Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics) to get a crash course in what's behind the scenes.

The Father of Manga
In Japan the comic book form most widely in circulation is manga. I'm not going to pretend to know even a fraction of the history of manga, and there is much about current manga comics that I do not like (the hyper-sexualization of girls and women being primary), but there is at least one amazing piece of graphic novel history to point out, and that is the work of Osamu Tezuka. His last great epic, the tale of Buddha, is a mammoth undertaking: 8 volumes each consisting of around 400 pages. Rich in detail and humor it is also brisk in its pacing. It was the first thing I thought about when I began Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, mostly for it's historical scope -- not a perfect parallel, but that's the way the mind works.

Tezuka is generally recognized as the father of manga, and for good reason. He has long-form manga series that reach as far back as 1952's Astro Boy, 1949's Metropolis and 1948's Tuberculosis. All of these, by the way, perfectly suitable for middle grade readers today as they were for the commuting salarymen of Japan back in their day.

Does Tintin Count? Little Nemo?
Originally comic strips printed in newspapers, both Tintin and Little Nemo were later to be found in bound form presenting their stories complete as elaborate adventure tales. Herge's various Tintin episodes pack a world-traveling boy and his dog (and assorted regulars) on adventures that wouldn't be out of place alongside the movies serials of the 1930's or the more modern adventures of Indiana Jones. They have remained in print, are continually popular, and if I can be so bold, are in fact graphic novels. They follow the rules of graphic storytelling, complete unto themselves, and yat while most libraries I have been to carry them they somehow aren't kept with the graphic novels. Why is that?

As for Little Nemo in Slumberland, Windsor McCay's brilliantly rendered Sunday comic that imagined a dreamland more detailed than any ten comics you can find today, I'm bending things a bit here for it's inclusion. McCay I don't think ever imagined his 1905 cartoon would ever be collected into book form, much less considered seriously as a "novel", yet for all its fantasy and rubbery fiction it's as richly rewarding an experience for the reader as any fantasy novel of any era.

Looking Forward
This by no means is meant as a scholarly examination of the graphic novel, nor should it be construed as anything near complete or exhaustive. But given the recent ALA awards for both American Born Chinese and To Dance perhaps this is a good time to pause and reflect just what, exactly, we mean when we talk about graphic novels with regards to children's literature.

What I'm getting a sense of in blog and in the news and in just talking to people is that everyone agrees that graphic novels are a valid literary form but there's a lot of confusion over what constitutes good or worthy graphic literature. Booksellers either don't carry graphic novels because they don't understand the genre or, as with the larger chains, they carry large amounts of what is carried by the major publishers in a scattershot somethings-bound-to-click-with-the-public manner. One Borders I went into recently had an entire wall of Japanese manga -- nine feet tall by twenty feet wide -- and none of it classic, much of it dull, all of it series intended to generate repeat sales and not necessarily tell stories of consequence. They are, to put it bluntly, bound comic books labeled graphic novels in order to catch the zeitgeist.

It doesn't end there either. I recently was asked to review a series of non-fiction books that the publisher was calling graphic novel presentations that were nothing more than mere explanations on machinery with the thinnest of storylines ("We need to fix this train") drawn in a comic book format. That's the first danger I see, comic book appearance being labeled as graphic novels. It seems like we first need a clear definition of the graphic novel and, yes, it is different than a comic book and needs to be recognized as such.

I also happen to think that if we're going to consider graphic novels literature along side traditional novels then we need to apply similar rigor in determining their quality, value and worth. It is far too easy to be wowed by visuals and color, getting caught up in sweep of the unique, and missing the structural flaws in the story. It is equally easy to be moved along by the speed of the narrative and its humor and miss the stereotypes built into the visual shorthand.

Finally (for today at least) if we're going to bestow literary awards on graphic novels then I think we need to give them their own category and not spend a lot of time wringing hands over comparing apples to oranges. Comparing graphic novels with fiction is like comparing a stage play with a movie; Yes, they tell dramatic stories in time and space using actors and a script, but they are unique storytelling media, they are experienced differently by the viewer and they have their own separate awards to reflect that artisanship. Let's get this cleared up now so we don't have years worth of regret over having to pick among disparate artforms.

I have been mulling all this over for months now and haven't gotten to a fraction of the arguments and points I'd been outlining with myself in the shower (where I get most of my best thinking done). I have made a half dozen attempts to wrangle this subject in blog form and finally decided I just needed to spew out what I could and move on. I am not beyond examining the subject further but for now I need to leave this anchor behind and move on.

There's so much I haven't said, so many great graphic novels unmentioned, but I'm only one person, only one voice. I'd love to hear what others think.


Some Recommended Reading
The Dark Knight & The Dark Knight Returns Frank Miller
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dale Gibbons
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and
A Contract With God by Will Eisner
Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative by Will Eisner
Buddha by Osamu Tezuka
Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
To Dance by Siena Cherson Siegel and Mark Siegel
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
The Rabbi's Cat by Joann Sfar
Barefoot Gen: A Cartoon History of Hiroshima by Keiji Nakazawa
Blankets by Craig Thompson

Rejected

I could just as easily titled this post Blue Monday, in honor of it being the most depressing day of the year. But it's such a day of mixed feelings that I thought Rejected better spoke to my mood.

It's never good to get that envelope back from a publisher, especially when it looks recycled and has the previous address covered with a sticker and other bits and pieces covered over with a fat felt-tipped marker. I'm no Kreskin, but the envelope had all the markings of a sloppy, harried intern. I won't say which publisher or which editor's name was attached, only that it was a little sad to get back the manuscript with nary a comment in sight.

I didn't even get a terse little form letter.

But all is not lost. Before the mail came I was able to toss out 13 lucky manuscript pages that, raw as they are, feel a whole lot better than the manuscript that came home with it's tail between it's legs. Granted, we're talking apples and oranges here -- picture book versus YA -- but it was still nice to be able to get something out ahead of the influence of otherwise bad news.

Oh yeah, and the ALA made some sort of announcements today about some kind of awards. All I really have to say is that as much as I like Flotsam I was pretty sure it would be passed over for something like Adele and Simon. Time will tell whether American Born Chinese really is the best that graphic novels have to offer. I have issues with graphic novels, and it's all about the disconnect between the history and tradition of the form and whether or not the librarians and booksellers really are up to speed with understanding what makes a truly good graphic novel. I'm still stewing over a post about this. Some day...

A parting shout out to Vonnegut, who first introduced me to the phrase Goodbye Blue Monday and saved me from myself back in 8th grade when I was a pubescent mess.