| WHAT happened to Carol Tyler's father as a staff sergeant in the Army during World War II wasn't unusual. As she puts it in this remarkable memoir, "'You'll Never Know,'" he's "a member of a huge, exclusive community": 16 million American soldiers went off to war, and the ones who came back got on with their lives, or tried to. For nearly 60 years, he didn't talk about the war, even with his family. A proud, resourceful blue-collar craftsman, he could be taciturn and irritable; the relics of his military service in his garage fell into "the category of 'leave it the hell alone' or 'it's none of your goddamn business.'" As Tyler spells out on one page, rebus-style, "not all scars are visible." Then, one day in 2002, he called his daughter and opened up. (Tyler's rendition of the phone call that set this book in motion: "Hey, Dad! What's up?" "Rivers of blood!") she captured a few hours of his recollections on videotape, although he clammed up again when he got to the subject of Italy, where something awful apparently happened. As this volume (the first of three) ends, we still don't know what it was, although her art and his fading memory are circling warily around it. The tent poles of this book, subtitled "'A Good and Decent Man,'" are two brief sequences of an "Army scrapbook" Tyler made for him - not the photos he's held on to for decades, but sepia-toned cartoons, annotated with entertaining bits of his narration. He slept on a gun turret to avoid snakes; he set up a shower in the North African desert and was delighted that a sheik's "harum" used it. Still, the book is less about his experiences in the Army than everything that radiated out from them: the way they shaped the rest of his life, as well as his wife's and daughter's and granddaughter's lives. One resonance of the title is the World War II-era song of the same name; in part, this is a portrait of his 60-year romance with Tyler's mother. Another is that, as the author puts it, "you would never know" what had happened to him from the postwar life he constructed - the war may be the central fact of his psychological makeup, but he tried, with some success, to bury it "under tons of mental concrete." When her father told her his story, Tyler's own life was in flux: as we see in the book, her husband, the underground cartoonist Justin Green, had recently left her for a former baby sitter - although he was thinking about coming back - and she had moved from California to Ohio with their teenage daughter, Julia. (The book's acknowledgments include thanks to "Justin and Julia Green for support and for keening it interesting.") It's easy to see echoes of her father's dedication and grudging optimism, as well as his capacity for sublimating painful feelings in endless craft and construction projects, in what Tyler shows us of her open-hearted relationships with all of them and her stoic perseverance in dealing with her own downturns. "'You'll Never Know'" unfolds like a rambling reminiscence, except without the boring parts. It skitters around in time, every observation setting off another memory or meditation or visual flourish. Tyler's artwork flutters between representation, fantasy and symbolism, sometimes even in the same panel, but her stylistic virtuosity is a steadfast guide through her chronology's loops and pivots. On one page, she shows us an imagined scene in her family's backyard in the early '50s - kids playing in buckets of water, her mother hanging up a towel reading "Always Do Your Best," a TV set and a pair of pedal pushers floating in midair - then carefully annotates the anachronisms. She draws her father as a sturdy young man in an Army helmet and as a grouchy retiree in a trucker's cap, but also as a little boy in church with a halo floating over his horns, as a fox seeking out a peach labeled "Mom," and as a tree trying to teach fortitude to its fragile sapling of a daughter. Tyler has been drawing comics on and off since the 1980s; her 2005 collection of short pieces is aptly titled "Late Bloomer." She was a painter before she was a cartoonist, though, and she's adapted some painterly techniques to comics, even beyond her magisterial sense of color (she drew this project with 53 custom-mixed inks). Every panel is lush with visual and psychological detail. Her swooping ink lines have the fluidity and force of paint, and she treats the borders of her pages and images as frames, sometimes solid and unassuming but more often decorative or permeable or even broken. In one sequence, a despondent Tyler falls through the base of a panel and onto the bottom of the page, only to be scolded by her father in his easy chair ("Whaddya think you're layin' on!! Get up!!!") and an imaginary elf that we've earlier seen telling him to "keep your feelings secret!" He does, for the most part. But it's only in the final few pages of this volume that we fully understand what that has cost him and his family. As autumn turns to winter, a gust of wind that steals his hat becomes Hitler in his aging mind. Meanwhile, Tyler imagines herself stumbling into the "rivers of blood" that her father saw in "It'ly"; as she researches what might have happened to him, he explodes with fury over his delusion that she's stolen the Army pictures he loaned her. It's impossible not to compare "'You'll Never Know'" with Art Spiegelman's "Maus," the first great graphic novel about what happened to a cartoonist's father during World War II. They're very different sorts of books, though, in both their means and their ends. "Maus" is largely Vladek Spiegelman's own testimony amplified by the book's abject, minimal style and the allegory of its cat-and-mouse imagery, and is only secondarily about its creator's relationship with his father and his struggle with the enormity of his topic. Tyler's book is a vivid, affecting, eccentrically stylish frame built around a terrible silence. World War II was a crucible for Tyler's father, but for decades he buried it 'under tons of mental concrete.' Douglas Wolk is the author of "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean." He writes frequently about comics for The Times. |
