Howl: Review of a Graphic Novel

To illuminate is to alight, to enlighten, -or figuratively, to explain- and Allen Ginsberg's poem, Howl, by text alone, has achieved those remarkable definitive actions of the verb illuminate inside of the minds of Americans for over 40 years. Howl, unlike any other poem of its time, dominates the conversations of San Francisco beat poetry, solidifying its place in literary history. Now, in 2010, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman appear to have inscribed a space in Hollywood history for Ginsberg in producing a film that documents the process of the writing, speaking, and publishing of his infamous poem. And with the recent release of the film comes an accompanying graphic novel illustrated by Ginsberg's "Illuminated Poems" artist and friend, Eric Drooker.

"Howl: A Graphic Novel" resembles a more obscure graphic novel than the multitude of those sitting on the shelves at one's local bookstore. As Merriam Webster defines the standard graphic novel as "a fictional story that is presented in comic-strip format and published as a book," one immediately recalls that Ginsberg's Howl deviates from any formal ascribed meaning, let alone as a comic strip adaptation.

Drooker's interpretation of Howl lacks the ferocity of a poem so insubordinate as Ginsberg's masterpiece, capturing Howl's text inside of a standard, now consumerist literary form. A majority of the smooth images on the novel's satin pages resemble those early animations of a Pixar film, and complicates the poem's solemnity. Howl has always provoked discussion and reflection with its dismay. It's a poem that resembles a lit fuse, yet like all forms of art, the relationship between how a reader/audience perceives the work of art directly affects translation. Although Drooker's adaptation is no firecracker, it does uniquely interpret Ginsberg's masterpiece.

Playing upon the poem's title and the figurative (or perhaps literal) representation of those "angelheaded hipsters ... who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts," the novel's frontispiece depicts a man silhouetted by a full moon, on his knees leaning toward the stars as if howling like a werewolf. Associations between madness and bestial transformation date back to the middle ages when the "sick," or psychologically disordered were treated as sub-human, and in the broad scope of society, or Ginsberg's society for that matter, those associations have not changed. While some readers may perceive the frontispiece as a calling, or a cry for assistance, and others, a degeneration into disorder, the ambiguity exists in the title as well as the image Drooker chose to jacket the novel.

Throughout section one, Drooker's illustrations provide unique interpretative and literal representations of Ginsberg's stanzas. One of the more interesting illustrations Drooker incorporates in this first section pictures a man, presumably in one of Ginsberg's "paint hotels," emitting a tangled array of light out of the hotel room window. In the luminescence, Drooker includes paintings and pails of paint (or turpentine), yet what makes the relationship between the words and the image intriguing is the stanza on the right page. The stanza's lines "with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, / alcohol and cock and endless balls" lists the overwhelming faculties of young adulthood, and Drooker's image provides an emission of excessive light, cluttered, yet as seemingly cathartic as pronouncing Ginsberg's lines.

In section two, Drooker's Moloch -an industrial building that transforms into a raging beast- embodies Ginsberg's sacrificial monster of industry. A mutation of the darkly shaded, thousand windowed "Moloch" that Allen Ginsberg points towards in Harry Redl's photograph, this Moloch appears more like a minotaur than the Semitic god. And although a transformed minotaur surrounded by fire and praising hands, with his cartoonish drawing, Moloch has the resemblance of Chernabog: Mickey Mouse's adversary in Disney's "Fantasia." This is where Drooker's glossy images fail to project the biting ferocity of Ginsberg's poetry. Rather than present wickedness, Moloch's glazed horns, firm shoulders, and defined torso suggest a figure prepared to campaign for California Governor -not conquer the United States.

As the poem nears its end at page one hundred and sixty-seven, its dedicatee, Carl Solomon, finds his way into the lines. The illustrations in this section emphasize Solomon's solitude -both singular, and that which Ginsberg shares. Drooker's illustrations correspond to doctors' psychological experimentation on Solomon, and end with an explosion of the Solomon-self into an insubordinate coterie of spirits, colliding into the "coughing,"American, Moloch. Ginsberg's spirits, now transformed into the poem's "angelic bombs" have become sacrificial martyrs, failing to destroy Moloch, yet infuriating the industrial beast. However thrilling this climactic moment in the novel may be, it becomes excessively hyperbolic. Prior to the illustrations, this section of Howl as a poem on its own standing is over-dramatic, yet including the images, a reader's sensory response becomes overwhelmed: an inherent flaw in the propositioning of Howl into a graphic novel -the words generate enough sensation on their own.

In the "Footnote to Howl," Drooker's images relay the exaltations of "Everything is holy!". While the footnote descends into maundering, his images react with flames and chaos. The poems final breath: "Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul" precedes the departure of Drooker's birds on a telephone poll, furthering the concept of the empty solitude of the inanimate object: Ginsberg's sign for industry and democratic prosper. These are by far Drooker's brightest moments in the novel. His winding down of images allows for their easy disappearance. Constellations set in, and the book's final illustration is of our journeyer, staring out into the grey muck of the American world.

The interior jacket images to "Howl: a Graphic Novel" function as historical insight into the work shared by Drooker and Ginsberg while they collaborated on "Illuminated Poems". While both are captioned, their inclusion provides a unique look at Drooker and Ginsberg's relationship as artists, and contextualizes Drooker's credibility for taking on such a project. And although the graphic novel adaptation of quite possibly the most infamous poem of American history conveys all of the issues concerning interpretation, including the most complex issue in all of literature with show, don't tell, Eric Drooker provides a distinctive rendition of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, without ruining the beat.