Sadly, it isn't too often that a major new comic hits the racks. I'm talking about works that push the whole medium forward, that show what comics are really capable of when not confined to the parameters of superhero sagas. Neil Gaiman's The Sandman is such a work, as was his debut, the evocative Violent Cases. The latter was his first collaboration with Dave McKean, an artist who has, throughout his career, gone where few others even thought it was possible to go. Though the duo was worked together many times since, their latest endeavor takes them back to the arena of memory and the tricks it plays. The result is their most realized creation to date: Mr. Punch — or, to give it its full title, The Tragical Comedy Or Comical Tragedy Of Mr. Punch.
*
Mr. Punch is a 96-page graphic novel co-published by Victor Gollancz and Vertigo that takes as one of its themes (this is a tale with many levels) the puppet show of Punch and Judy... and before I go any further, I'd better explain that last bit. Punch and Judy is practically a British national institution and has been for several decades — a part of every English childhood. It's a puppet show performed at children's parties and on the beaches of seaside vacation resorts, and it's an incredibly violent puppet show. Gaiman's story, it should be understood, is about violence — and mystery, and memory, and a lot of other things, too.
It's a story that had its genesis on a rainy afternoon about four years ago, when Neil got caught in a rainstorm in the picturesque London suburb of Greenwich: "I took refuge in a junk shop, to get out of the rain. And in the junk shop they had Sidney de Hempel's book How To Do Punch And Judy, sitting on a pile of junk. I picked it up, said, 'How much is this?', and the little old lady in this junk shop — she looked at and said, 'Fifteen quid.' And I thought about it for a second, and I paid my money. Took the book home, my fifteen quid circa 1917 book on how to do Punch and Judy. And when I finished it... it ends with this wonderful little description of the plot: The baby starts crying, Punch throws the baby out the window and kills it; Judy comes up and complains; he kills her; a policeman comes to arrest him; he kills the policeman; he has a fight with a crocodile; the doctor comes to heal him; he kills the doctor; they come to hang him; he kills the hangman; the devil comes to take him off to hell; he kills the devil. And the last line was: 'And Mister Punch then goes off to spread joy and happiness to children all over the land.
"And that combined in the back of my head with my love for and obsession with Henry Mayhew, the Victorian writer, and his interviews in London Labour and the London Poor. And with an interview he did with a Punch and Judy man, who talks about old Punch and Judy shows, and talks about how old Punch and Judy men never die rich. He talks about 'Porsini, 'im who brought Punch and Judy over here from Italy. 'E performed before the King, sir, and 'e died in the gutter. And the next one, 'im who introduced the Toby dog, 'e was performing for two gold coins every performance, performing before Dukes, sir, and 'e died in the workhouse. And I shall die there as well...' And those two things sat in my head and got gradually composted, in with various memories of Punch and Judy, and a lot of family memories — weird family shit. The mystery of the hunchbacked uncle... I have actually based the uncle in there on a real uncle — my uncle Monty, who really was a hunchback. And everybody in the family, all the older generation, came up with a different story about why he was a hunchback. Had he been thrown out the window, or down the stairs? Nobody knew for sure; and like all proper family stories, it's incapable of resolution."
Neil was thus drawn once again to explore the realm of childhood. Is Mr. Punch really Violent Cases II? Have he and McKean come full circle? "I'm not sure if it's full circle — it's a similar point on the same spiral. Violent Cases was an interesting anomaly. I mean, we did it seven or eight years ago — I wrote it in 1986 — and it's still in print all over the world. I went to Germany this year and discovered that it was up for the German Max and Morris award as the best graphic novel published in Germany. And it lost, much to my relief. The Germans asked me how did I feel about it losing, and I said, 'Well, much the same way as I would about my eight-year-old daughter losing a Bouncy Baby competition!
"Violent Cases was the first thing we did, and it was a look at various subjects that obsessed me, including childhood, secrecy, fear, families, violence... Violent Cases was an odd phenomenon — it was beginner's luck. The first time I ever played darts, I was in a pub somewhere in London, and someone said, 'Here did you ever play darts?' And I said, 'No, what do you do?' And they said, 'Well, you hold it like this, and you stand like this, and you just throw straight forward.' And I threw a bullseye. The next five darts didn't even hit the board...
"The Sandman hit the board, but that was a little bit later. And even with The Sandman, I think, it took a good year, year and a half of writing it, before it started getting interesting, getting good, getting strange...
"But Mr. Punch is very much the same voice as Violent Cases, which begs the question, is this meant to be the same character? And how autobiographical is it? I think it's probably the same character, because the narrator of Violent Cases is an unreliable me, narrating memories from the age of four. Mr. Punch is every bit as unreliable, every bit as much based on my memories, aged eight. The only part of it that really isn't true — or is true, but I've moved it — is that while it is true that my grandfather did own an unsuccessful copy of the pier, set in a warehouse or somewhere in Portsmouth, it had died and folded before I was born. And I discovered that while talking to my parents about Punch and Judy, about their memories of Punch and Judy as children. While they were talking, my dad happened to mention that my grandfather had once owned this arcade, and the centrepiece was a mermaid. And that put it all together for me. So, yes, much of it is true."
And what about Punch and Judy? What is this mysterious puppet drama really about?
"I spent about two and a half years researching Mr. Punch before I wrote it and came away at the end with the impression that nobody really knows anything. There's nothing you can be sure of with Punch, other than it has resisted many attempts to change it, and you can trace it back either to the English mummer's plays or the Italian Comedia del Arte, and that it's this strange, violent story that has somehow carved out a place in the English national psyche. And it's about violence, and it's about pain. It's about what we tell children — what entertainment are we giving children? You obviously saw Punch and Judy shows as a child — do you have any memories of it? 'Cause I didn't, 'til I went looking for them... And you don't remember the plot — you only remember some of it." I admit that I only remember odd, unconnected images: Punch's fight with the crocodile, the policeman and his truncheon. Neil continues triumphantly, "That's the thing I discovered when I started talking to people, including my parents, about this: people don't remember the whole thing, they don't put it all together."
Which brings us back to memory and the fact that a memory from childhood is usually incomplete and stilted, because children only see a part of the picture. Adults live, in the words of Mr. Punch's narrator, "in a bigger world to which children are denied access." Yet while children are largely excluded — and protected — from the mysteries of sex and income tax, they still sense the dimensions and currents of adult life without understanding them. And, strangely, violence is often allowed to filter through, and always has been, from Punch and Judy to Tom and Jerry... "Yeah. You're being given glimpses of an incredibly violent adult world, but you don't understand it," agrees Neil. "That's why I think Punch and Judy is a lovely analogy. In England, anyway, whenever Punch and Judy gets used as a metaphor, it's always for wife-battering. People forget that Punch kills Judy; that's never remembered. They remember he hits her, but never that he kills her. I wanted to get that feeling into the book. I wanted to get the feeling that you get as an adult when you look back, and you suddenly realized that the reason why Aunt Eudora was carried out of that wedding when she started singing and all the adults started looking at her was she was drunk! You look back from twenty years of adult experience at a childhood, and the shapes of it change, and shapes of what the adults were doing change. And your understanding of the adults changes..."
Which is when you realize that your parents are — and always were — human, and fallible. "A lot of that is what Mr. Punch is about," Neil continues. "And it's the motive force. In Violent Cases the world view of the kid is that of a three-year-old, in which the world is huge but not threatening. There's very little that the kid in Violent Cases is scared of, though he doesn't necessarily understand things. The kid in Mr. Punch is terrified. The kid in Mr. Punch knows enough to be scared. He won't ride the ghost train, even though he knows that it's probably not very scary, because the ghost train in his head is scarier and it might be that bad."
"I think it's the best writing Neil's done," says Dave McKean, and I agree with him. Mr. Punch has a quality of honesty about it, a maturity that enables it to be richly subtle. Gaiman admits that it took a lot of hard work to get it right: "It was — if not the hardest writing I've ever done, then very close to it. And it went through more drafts, more real drafts than anything else I've done. It reached three drafts, and each draft was a major re-working — just honing it down, and getting it there... trying to get everything in there to work at the same time so you follow gradually through the Punch and Judy play, you watch how the play gets reflected in the actions of the people, you get more information than the child. One is never quite sure when some of the characters are lying to the child. By the time the reader has finished Mr. Punch, the reader knows more than the narrator either knows or has said. One gets the feeling that perhaps the narrator is putting things together while he tells the story, too."
But Gaiman stresses that much of Mr. Punch's impact comes from McKean's visualization and "incredible level of linear storytelling. I think the difference between this and Arkham Asylum, or Black Orchid, or whatever, is just the level of control. Everything's in there, including a completely new way of creating images for Dave. It has some of the best art I've ever seen, and some of the tightest control from Dave. The drawing style he developed is like taking everything he learned from Cages, and then adding color. There's a terrific simplicity to it that's still accessible."
"I learned a lot about just paring down images is Cages to what's important, and letting go a lot of the illustration — just getting down to what's needed," Dave McKean later confirms. "And a lot of that rubbed off on this — although I thought this one needed more ornamentation, because of the nature of the story and the nature of the memories... and Punch and Judy as well. I mean, everything to do with Punch and Judy is very ornate, usually — the old posters and the whole style of it."
I asked Dave whether he'd found himself doing a ton of research for the book. "A fair amount on Punch," he confirms, "and also a fair amount just on puppetry in general. Because Mr. Punch is very traditional, very staid — and even with the modern puppet shows, there's very little difference. If you take out the modern references, which are usually pretty crass, there's very little difference between a modern Punch and Judy and old one. But the history of puppetry is just amazing, and there's some fabulous stuff that's been done, all over the place. I picked up some amazing brochures from the Bread and Puppets Museum in America, and it was just... inspiring. It's carried over into work that I'm doing for another book, dealing with puppets and animated figures and trying to put real life into inanimate objects.
"One of my favorite images is the little magnifying glass with the two pincers that go up in the air. I really like that little image... there's life within everything. I'd never really explored that much before — and yet I've always used objects before, but haven't thought of them that way."
For Mr. Punch, McKean has come up with a dazzling array of technique and style, using photography, drawing, and painting — and creating his own three-dimensional model puppets. At first, I found all this versatility intrusive and irritating, but within a few pages, the art had sucked me in completely and I was simply lost in the story, so thoroughly does McKean's imagery echo Gaiman's words.
"Visually, it's supposed to act like a conversation," McKean explains. "Inasmuch as when you first sit down within somebody who's going to tell you a story, you're distracted still, and he's just putting in, 'Well, I was about that age, and it was around about that time, near the seaside...' And maybe you're trying to visualize it roughly, but it's all very general. But when it actually gets down to specific anecdotes and specific people saying specific things then the storytelling tends to close down to just much more regular comic panel-by-panel stuff. Then, when you back out to 'It was a few years later, and it was this and this...' then it's much more still-lifes again. It's just supposed to mirror conversation, so it does ebb and flow, and I wouldn't expect anybody to give it full concentration all the time. That's why there's so much extraneous stuff there to pick up on — you can wander around the still-lifes for a while, and then go back to the specific stories afterwards."
Was the diversity of his styles here a conscious effort to convey different feelings to different aspects of the story?
"Yes, but I think it's more now that... I've been playing with all this kind of stuff for years, and I just feel very happy with what I like now," Dave explains. "Whereas I think before, it was a lot more, 'Oh, I fancy trying a bit of that and a bit of that and a bit of that' — just to try it. And having tried a lot of different kinds of ways of making imagery, I'm happy with what I like, and it feels like my kind of thing now, rather than somebody else's. So, it's just... what the scene needs to be told in its best way. I mean, the two main things have always been — from Violent Cases to now — photographic imagery versus drawn imagery. I say 'versus' because it's all about the expectations of photography being truthful — when of course it's not, and it's that much more insidious because it's not — and drawing as being 'adapted' reality, not being truthful. Whereas very often they are — very often they're much more honest. That is playing all the way through Mr. Punch, deliberately — so that all the supposed 'real' events are drawn, and all the characters look a bit like puppets. And all the puppet show stuff is photographed, and all the strange stories in the middle that look like drawings are sepia-tone photographs of people running around fields in big masks. So, I just want to play off people's expectations of images, as well as just what feels emotionally right for the scene."
How had he felt initially, when Neil had suggested returning to Violent Cases territory?
"I was very worried about that, because I didn't want it to be just a rehash of that. But it's such a rich field, it's endless; every book could be a book about what memory is. Those themes are just so rich, you'll never run out of ways of dealing with it. So in the end, I was happy to go back to those places."
I asked Neil if he and Dave planned to return to this area a third time, at some future date — to revisit the narrator of Mr. Punch in his teens, say. "If we ever do it, he'd be aged... probably eleven. That's the next major age, just before puberty. Things change again then... But I think, right now, neither of us has an urge to do another one, just on a level of... finally feeling that we got it right. The difference between Mr. Punch and anything else I've done is that there's nothing else I've ever done that I didn't feel at least a little bit apologetic about. I was ready to hand them over, but as I did so I'd make the little excuses and the little apologies. You know what I mean? 'This would have been better if we'd had more time, that would have been better if we'd had more pages...', that kind of thing. I don't have that with Mr. Punch. It's more like, 'Here you go — it's the best thing I've ever done. It's the best thing Dave's ever done. I hope you like it.' What I feel about it is not contingent on whether or not people like it, or what they think about it. It feels like it's done, is fine, and I hope — like Violent Cases — demands to be taken seriously on its own terms."
Bearing in mind that Punch and Judy is a very British phenomenon, I asked Neil what he thought American readers would make of the book. "I haven't got a clue," he laughs. "To be honest, that's one reason why you actually do get the whole story of Punch and Judy. It gets fairly well explained, and I think that most people who read the book will come away with a better knowledge of Punch and Judy than most English people — they'll come away with everything except the actual experience of sitting on the ground, looking up at a candy-striped tent while a little man with a big stick screams 'That's the way to do it!' and kills his wife."