Comic failure

March 7, 2006 | "Put the Book Back on the Shelf: A Belle & Sebastian Anthology" isn't a bad idea for a book, exactly, but it's not an obvious one, either: short comics by 24 cartoonists (and writer/artist teams), inspired by songs by the Scottish indie-pop band Belle & Sebastian. Good comics can sometimes be adapted neatly into other media, as Hollywood knows well, but worthwhile comics adaptations from other media are rarer. The cartoonists who've made something good out of borrowed source material are usually the ones who've taken enormous liberties with it: David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik tearing open Paul Auster's "City of Glass," Gary Panter riffing wildly on Dante in his "Jimbo's Inferno" and "Jimbo in Purgatory." Song-comics are mostly unexplored territory, too -- the only serious, large-scale attempt at them has been Charles Vess' "The Book of Ballads," and Vess and his collaborators had the advantage that the tunes they were adapting were heavy on plot and fantastic imagery.

The advantage that "Put the Book's" contributors are working from, on the other hand, is that their fans and Belle & Sebastian's overlap considerably. These cartoonists mostly represent the new generation of American independent comics -- artists who draw more on ideas from fine art and illustration than from the mainstream comics tradition. Their work is published by small companies like Oni Press and Slave Labor Graphics, and in anthologies like Kazu Kibuishi's "Flight" series; it tends to be about the same sort of bookish, lovelorn youth valorized by Belle & Sebastian leader Stuart Murdoch.

Even so, Murdoch's songs are particularly resistant to the comics form; for all his lyrics' dramatic personae and striking imagery, they're hard to refashion into a short, visually compelling story. That's not surprising, actually. Most of Belle & Sebastian's lyrics aren't really narratives at all -- they just sound like they are. See, for instance, this verse from 2000's "The Model":

I will confess to you
Because I didn't think about the message
As I walked down the alleyway it was a Sunday
All my friends deserted me because you painted me
As the fraud I really was
And if you think you see with just your eyes you're mad
Lisa learned a lot from putting on a blindfold
When she knew she had been bad
She met another blind kid at a fancy dress
It was the best sex that she ever had

There are plenty of signs of a plot there: action, chronology, characters, a couple of kinky surprises. But the more you think about it, the stranger and more ambiguous it gets. Most of the motion is actually going on in the language, which slides from first to second to third person and from "painted" to "see" to "blindfold" to "blind"; "confess" is echoed by "Sunday," "model" by "painted." "Fancy Dress," Jennifer de Guzman and Brian Belew's adaptation of "The Model" in "Put the Book," involves a guy wearing what looks like a blindfold to a formal-dress party; called out by a woman for flirting with her to get close to her friend, he writes her a letter beginning, "I will confess to you, you painted me as the fraud I really was." That's a lot less complicated, and a lot less interesting.

Next page: The most satisfying pieces here are by people who've been cartooning for many years