>>REVIEW
AN ALPHABETICAL BALLAD OF CARNALITY
David Sandlin
Fantagraphics Books, 32 pp.
The Alphabetical Ballad of Carnality is an abject, alliterative allowance of avarice, a book (or, as Fantagraphics Books calls it, a picto-novellete) of breasts and bested beastism ("He who makes a beast of himself forgets the pain of being a man" – Dr. Samuel Johnson). Couplets of carnality caress its pages, country songs hum country-fried in its illustrative soundtrack.
Undaunted by the danger and dirtiness of his creative deed, David Sandlin desperately draws the depravity of "Damn Nation": every flaw and each effortless pose of easy sin engrosses. (Sandlin expresses in explanation: "America as a land of lotus-eaters, neither good nor bad, just oblivious and inebriated.") Each page exhibits verse and metre, an elegant exposition of earnest story. Though "elegant" is not quite the exact word to express the elegiac excesses of ink and colour.
Flaws include the free and flowing way the text filters through: flipping fast, readers might find themselves finishing too soon, fragments of fiction left unread – it’s easy to grift through graphics, the greed of it all, and to have the hurt of the harried story heft itself away. How happily the book hurries through its prose.
Incredibly, though, the ink propels intense interest in infidels and idiots and jerks with jeans full of jilting, jingoism and jewelry. It keeps killing the reader’s kibosh: left with loveless illustrations of lingerie-losing maidens, love is gone but lust lures us into a lull of lush, magnificent movements of madness. This motion is meticulously marked by Monte Beauchamp, who marshals the editing and design.
Now, no one will mention that this has never been done before. As new as Crumb or as novel as Neolithic cave-art, our orgy of story oscillates between ogling and perdition. Please consider the pages inside as paraphernalia of Paradise/"Pair-o-dice" lost – these pages are the queries of our quill-wielder’s alter ego. They are quirky souvenirs of shallow explorations: sodomy, sexuality, usury, et cetera.
Sandlin’s storybook is not as sure and shattering as Spiegelman’s (haven’t read Maus yet?). Sure, Sandlin sinks into the sallow sweetness of sex and sin ("Born again through sin!" He signals from a sketched newspaper), but Sandlin is exploring "Sinland," his sobriquet for his thematic studies ("you could call it Dante’s Divine Comedy meets Hank Williams" he says, and again: "It was pure serendipity that Sinland is an anagram of Sandlin").
This story is succinctly described as psychobilly sex-art: regard this raucous rockabilly ride as a rousing tour-de-sin or, more tellingly, as a tour-de-transgression. The tale is told in trenchant drawings like Fifties-era tattoos. Ultimately, the undulating graphics themselves utter unbelievably volant verbs of violence, and words of wretchedness. They wreak a sort of whirlwind on your wits. You may not yearn for wanton yoni – but in the end, the re-born hero’s zany zealotry also seems like zot: zippo, zilch, zero. |
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