Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books
It’s been six years since Tim Lane’s Abandoned Cars, and it seems everything the guy has drawn in the interim has been collected into his new one, The Lonesome Go.
The latter is a 296-page gathering of Lane’s comic strips, diary entries, dreams, nonfiction digressions and other form-lets into a compendium. Lane, who makes his home in St. Louis, has filled the book with musings in his distinctive noir style.
If you are down-at-the-heels, Lane wants to draw you. The homeless, cheaters, bettors at the poker-den, killers, hitchhikers, basement-dwellers, the obsessed, the insane, and the people who rot in front of a cocktail at the corner bar are his people. In this graphic storyteller’s hands, the meek get meeker, and the befuddled wanderer meets with no satisfaction. Fights between drifters riding the rails, and the quiet terrors of those who lie down and fall asleep in cold, dark forests are recurring motifs. We’re in Hubert Selby territory here.
A married man obsessed with a stripper captures his quarry—and the bizarre sex is every bit as intense as he imagined. An amnesiac plods through his troubles, yet has no idea of the trouble he’s truly in. In one of Lane’s assignments published by the Riverfront Times, he draws the men of “Hopeville,” a tragically named homeless encampment a la the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression.
Almost to a one, these are shaggy-dog stories, with endings that fizzle to a place neither here nor there. The nebulous, dreamy quality makes for a loose, louche, barely narrative journey. Life is a spin of the roulette wheel—a sucker’s game—and a neat ending is for winners, chief. Lane positions any form of catharsis well outside the frames of these strips.
His sense of humor is much easier to grasp. “Crazy?” one jamoke asks another in a comic. “Show me someone who ain’t crazy and I’ll show you a hamburger who can sing the blues.” A man sings “I’m through with love, I’ll never fall again,” just before a juvenile delinquent cuts his Achilles tendon. (Sick and effective.) An emcee at a seedy cabaret has a pronounced stutter. The darkness and violence breed a desperate, ugly humor, and it’s a balm to the reader. Country aphorisms, period jargon and cursing apoplectics add to the fun.
If the plotting is relaxed here, the art is meticulous. Drawings of a WWII B-17 ball-turret gunner being hit by enemy fire and nearly incinerated are gripping. Disfigured hobos lurch from panel to panel into fresh horrors. The vintage hairstyles of the ‘40s, nude bodies, a prescription-pill driven freak-out climaxing in much vomit: whatever he draws, Lane’s heavily shadowed style is always a marvel. The nighttime scenes – which are most of them – rise from seas of black ink.
Like a Tom Waits or a Nick Cave song in graphic form, the book is mournful fun.
The Lonesome Go is published by Fantagraphics Books; for more info, visit their website.
