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1999's
Bread & Wine, a 44 pp., squarebound 10" X 8" autobio comic written by black, gay science-fiction writer, professor and theorist Samuel R. Delany and drawn by artist /martial arts instructor Mia Wolff, is difficult to write critically about; I'm afraid I'm going to lapse into mere rhapsodic description. (In all fairness, I think that Alan Moore, who wrote the intro, occasionally struggles with this impulse too; at times, his habitual purple prose goes positively eggplant.) Which is too bad:
Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York —the story, told in flashback, of how Delany became a couple with a homeless man, Dennis — is a rich text deserving informed analysis and a sense of how it fits into Delany's larger body of work. Whereas, I just read it as the rarest of all love stories (and autobio comics, for that matter): though there's quite a bit of sexual heat (graphically depicted, too) between the two men, their relationship is fundamentally built on kindnesses, forthrightness, and trust. It's romantic, intelligent and, yes, erotic, simultaneously warm and unsentimental.
I remembered
Bread & Wine fondly from when I read it almost 10 years ago: rereading it, I saw what initially appeared to be amateurish art on the first page, so I was worried that it wouldn't hold up. Instead, I was able to appreciate Wolff's black-and-white, pen-and-ink work more fully with more knowledge of the comics medium: she mostly draws full page, using panels to pinpoint intimate moments or showcase important details. The New York setting is often represented via crosshatching that manages to impart both urban density and the movement of a city street, while also conveying the sense that Dennis and Delaney exist in their own private, charged space. Words look more handwritten than lettered; she vacillates between elaborate rendering and scribbles as the story calls for it. But even her loosest drawings have an acute sense of bodies in relation to space, to one another; her figures' body language is easily "read" (perhaps her professional physical pursuits helped her to develop this artistic ability).[1]
Wolff is also adept at using visual strategies to represent emotions: on page 7, while Dennis is talking about how he's longing for intimacy, both sexual and otherwise,
his braid coils around the front of the panel, appearing to tentatively forge a connection with the figure of Delany. On page 13, when Delany and Dennis enter a hotel that Dennis has been nervous about gaining entrance to (given his state of hygiene), Delany, a man of letters, leads the way, holding a book (or maybe a folder or a binder) protectively, as if it shields them both. I might not be able to pick the real-life Delany or Dennis out of a police lineup after reading the book, but I know precisely how Delaney felt about Dennis every minute of their offbeat courtship.
Delany is especially attracted to Dennis' hands; accordingly, Wolff lavishes extra attention on hands.
Stephen Frug writes about that at more length here, though I'm a bit surprised Frug didn't mention page 37, in which the reader sees Dennis' reactions to and pleasure in new foods expressed through his hands. (In fact, Frug's exercise of focusing on a single page of a comic, coupled with Leigh Walton's comment a few weeks ago that certain comics images are seared into his brain, led me to think about the page from this comic I've held in my memory for years: page 3. What is being depicted isn't, in and of itself, very exciting: Delany is facing the reader, hand out, taking a book from Dennis, whom he's met only moments before. He doesn't have the money on him to pay for the book, but Dennis gives it to him anyway, telling him to come back and pay for it later. I'm not as familiar with Delany's oeuvre as I'd like to be, but I do know, from Earl Jackson Jr.'s book
Strategies of Deviance, that he often writes couples in which the power dynamic is fluid. In
B&W, the power shifts are gentle; visually, on page 3, Dennis' generous act is given equal weight to Delany's when Delany invites Dennis into his life and into his home.
Though Delany's writing in
B&W is enough to keep a lit major busy (it takes lines and a little of its structure from the poem "
Bread and Wine" by the German lyric poet Friedrich Holderlin, not to mention the possible applications of Delany's paraliterary theory to the book)[2], Wolff also indulges in art references (Picasso's "Starry Night" makes an appearance on page 11) and visual puns (on page 9, when, in his own words, Delany is propositioning Dennis, they are standing under a sign for a store that reads "BEDDING"). Delany and Wolff's pacing is deliberate: though it's short,
B&W is not a quick read. But it's all sustained by a real core of emotion: though the book could have easily turned into mere pornography, revelry in abjection, and/or, worse, look-at-my-sexy-boyfriend, Delany chooses to show things like a nostalgic reaction to a PBS special and Dennis endearingly asking basically everybody he knows about what he should do about their relationship. (Nick the Cop: "If he was going to do anything
weird sexually, he'd'a tried
that at the
motel. What can you lose?").
B&W is also beautifully packaged by Juno Books: the title is in embossed gold, and the cover is an oil painting featuring (what else?) Dennis's hands. (Actually,
B&W is out of print, but very cheap in the used book market.) Not only is this slim volume filled out with the aforementioned Alan Moore intro, but also an afterward of sorts in which the book's real-life counterparts critique it, also mentioning some of the things they had to leave out. The back cover has a banner proclaiming it a "graphic novel" (as well as suitable for friendly neighborhood bookstores' autobiography/Erotica/Gay Letters sections). Now that Alison Bechdel's
Fun Home is an established critical and commercial success, no doubt assigned in many a graphic novel, lit, women- and queer- studies class, I hold hope that some sort of halo effect may cause readers to discover
Bread & Wine.
Notes:
[1] It's revealed in the back of the book that she was also able to see her subjects naked, an opportunity not often afforded comics artists.
[2] The comic Bread & Wine also distinguishes itself from the poem with a voluptuous ampersand.
Images ©1999 Samuel. R Delany & Mia Wolff
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2010
