With the 1992 publication of Flood! A Novel In Pictures, Eric Drooker kicked off an impressionistic trilogy of graphic novels about city life. Blood Song: A Silent Ballad followed in 2002, and the trilogy came to a close with Naked City, in which Drooker adds dialogue to the mix to tell the interconnected stories of a musician and a painter seeking inspiration and chasing success.
Drooker discussed the evolution of this book—and New York City’s role as his muse—in this interview.
Naked City has a lot of similarities with Flood! in terms of its theme, but because of the addition of dialog, it works very differently. This is your first book to use any text whatsoever besides whatever was part of the scenery. What made you decide to add this new element?
I started working on Naked City a few years back, and the first year or so it was wordless. After a year or so, I started thinking about dialogue. That's something that you can't really fake any other way, the dialect that a person uses and the rhythm of their language. The challenge that I laid down for myself years ago was to try to communicate clearly without using any words at all. You should be able to tell a narrative, even a longform narrative, without resorting to using any verbal language at all. Pictures are their own kind of language but that's all. It's just a consistent language with a consistent grammar, right? But after a while, I started to relax. I've explored wordless storytelling pretty thoroughly between Flood! and Blood Song. I wanted to see what other nuances I could express in the story by using words here and there.
I started to be very sparing, with just an occasional word balloon. But then I started getting more on a roll with it and introduced additional characters. That was another departure from Flood! and Blood Song, which had these lone protagonists against the world. Naked City has three main characters, and then another three peripheral characters, and they're all interacting with one another. I started to enjoy using the different vocabulary of comics, not just word balloons, but thought bubbles; you could have the what the character is thinking contradict what the character just said, very blatantly. It's tricky to do that in any other form.
I wasn't really riffing on comics. I was more in the tradition of the woodcut novels from the 1920s and the 1930s. There were only a handful of artists who were doing it back then, including Lynd Ward, an American illustrator who successfully published a few books in the 1930s that didn't have any words at all. But this was the era of silent movies, so the public was accustomed to that type of art form where it relies heavily on body language and gestures rather than words. You don't expect to hear the voice of Buster Keaton or Chaplin, right? It's all in their body movements.
You've worked for so long on perfecting storytelling through images, without verbal language. And in this book, you employed verbal language in pretty much every way it can be employed in comics.
I was exploring. I was having fun. Why hold back at this point? But then I did go back and I edited it down. I asked, “Are the words adding anything? Are they necessary? Can we follow the story without them?” If we could follow the story without the words, maybe I should eliminate all of these word balloons, or most of them. I was constantly whittling it down. I don't know if you noticed this, but the captions only occur in Isabel's chapters. Her chapters have some exposition, some captions, mostly in the form of diary entries, as if she's entering it in a diary after the fact. I decided not to use that in the painter’s chapters. Everything we see in Chapter Two and Chapter Four is what the painter is experiencing, and there's never a scene that he's not in. It's almost through his eyes, just as Chapters One, Three and Five are through Isabel’s eyes.
The other departure, aside from the use of words, is that there's more humor happening. It's more cartoony. I'm not only using the vocabulary of old comic strips or comic books in the goofiest possible way — word balloons, thought bubbles, exaggeration with some of the characters. The painter is more of a cartoon character than Isabel is. He's the comic relief in what is otherwise a more serious story.
Her backstory gradually comes to us in the form of flashbacks. There's a series of childhood traumas that she's trying to escape from. She's hitchhiking. She's running away from something. She's not just going to the big city. She's running away from ICE. Although I started this a few years ago, you could see the direction that things are moving in this country with the hysteria about immigration and who's documented and who's undocumented. I thought that would be a good theme, because if you think about it poetically or philosophically, it's a bit of a non sequitur. What are you talking about? How could one person be legal and one person be illegal? That's already an artificial mindset that has to be indoctrinated at an early age to even be able to get your mind around the concept like that.
In some ways, the artist in Naked City feels like the artist in Flood! with a grown-up vibe.
He's similar. His black cat is that same black cat that the artist had in Flood! It’s a comedy. I'm calling it a comedy, although it's tragicomic. I go back to Chaplin all the time. If you've ever seen Modern Times or City Lights, they’re funny as hell, but there's also a lot of tragedy woven right in. Chaplin is an artist who continues to influence me in his form and subject matter.
I was very conscious about making this book funny. Not on every page, but a good dose of humor, especially with the arc of the painter, where I'm goofing on myself. He's a more idealistic, more naive version of myself and other artists who I've known. We think we're going to be discovered and be in a big gallery or art museum someday. You know that kind of “fine artiste” has been over for over a century, but the big joke is that the painter himself doesn't quite realize it. He still thinks that he's going to be successful doing oil on canvas — which isn't to say that there are a few artists who are still doing that. I still do it myself, but basically, the time has passed.
The humor is that the painter is very cartoonish. When the gallery dealer kicks him out, when his style suddenly becomes passe and the public is no longer interested in nude paintings, he doesn't just tell him to leave. He kicks the painter out with a big foot, like in a comic strip from the 1920s. When the window washer is kicked out of the gallery at the very end of Chapter Five, he also gets the big foot. I’m trying to balance the humor with the tragedy. It's this horrifying thing that's happening. Someone's being evicted, right? But if you exaggerate a giant foot and he's kicking them, there's an overstatement in the humor and it's kind of funny at the same time. That's really what slapstick is: it would be a tragedy if it actually happened to you. If you slipped on a banana peel and fell down into a manhole or fell down the stairs, it wouldn't be so funny. But if you're watching it, something happens to some somebody else, some hapless cartoon character, there is something inherently funny, at least to Americans.
One of the big shifts in this story is I realized that things are taking on an unmistakable dystopian quality. The times we're living in are so tragic for so many people that I didn't want to be creating another story that was tragic. I would call Flood! and Blood Song tragic. If I was going to tell another longform story, it was going to be a comedy. I wanted it to be a musical thing, something that would be a relief from the everyday terrifying reality. I decided to focus on these three bohemian artists, because I know what it's like to be, you know, a cultural worker trying to make a living through my pictures. I have musician friends who are trying to do the same thing for music.
But ultimately, the joke is on the painter and on all the artists, because all of them are expendable workers who are being exploited. You're looking at tragedy, but through an absurd lens.
What graphic novels did you read when you were a child? What are some of the influences here?
I was never particularly interested in the superhero thing. When I was 14 or 15, I enjoyed some of that Jack Kirby stuff. I still do, but living in the Lower East Side, growing up in the East Village, there were a couple of bookstores there that I wandered into at the tender age of 10 or 11 years old, and they had a big rack of underground comics that I picked up. And so I was exposed to some of not just R. Crumb, but all of the ZAP artists at an early age. That definitely had a big influence on me. I love all that stuff. It's hard to be interested in Marvel or DC Comics after experiencing counterculture comics, and that's where a lot of the politics comes from, some of it from Crumb and Spain Rodriguez.
There was an underground cartoonist in the 70s named Guy Colwell who's been all but forgotten. He never got much attention then, but he published a series back in the 70s called Inner City Romance. It had stories about people getting arrested, people spending time in prison, people coming back from the Vietnam War hooked on drugs — things that aren't dealt with in comic books or even in mainstream polite society. I stumbled upon Colwell when I was about 12 or so, and he had a big influence on me. I learned a lot about the prison industrial complex. He was a draft resister, and then he told stories of that, but he really got into how grim it was in prison, with prison rape and things like that. I was learning a lot about things from underground comics.
For how long were you working on Naked City? And what’s next for you?
I lost track, but I worked on it for several years. And it's the third in this trilogy. I'm now calling it the City Trilogy. Each one totally stands on its own as a novel, but it's a triptych, too; the city is a character in each one.
I'm in the middle of the next book, which is very different. It's a visual memoir of being born and raised in Manhattan. It’s a series of comics, including all of the New Yorker covers and then other paintings and drawings, laid out chronologically. I'm fleshing it out with words, these short descriptions and essays, giving some context and background. Why did I come up with this image? Why do I keep coming back to this theme? Again, the city is really the muse. Not just the city, but Manhattan. Living out on the West Coast, I could finally see New York City more clearly than when I was living there. I have a little bit of distance from it, as a little more perspective on it, and I even appreciate it more. It's like that old New Yorker cover: you can't really see the view from New York until you're out of New York to see it.
I realized this when I was in my late 30s: the city is in my blood. I no longer need to be here in person. James Joyce left Dublin, but his entire body of work was always about Dublin, and he was trying to process the whole experience he had there. I relate to that; if an artist is born and raised in one place, I think will always have that. They could go far away, but their emotional landscape will always be where they were born and raised, and their early experiences and family traumas and all of that. You can't really escape from those things.
