Broken Frontier

Luna Park is a complex political fable.  At its heart is the story of Alik, a Russian immigrant and his star crossed romance.  It is surreal and tells a dreamlike time travel story with a bit of historical fiction thrown in for good measure.

Kevin Baker is an accomplished novelist and Journalist.  His "City of Fire" trilogy garnered him much critical acclaim.  Dreamland, his second novel and the first of the trilogy, burst onto the scene like the flames that consumed its namesake and made him a star as he redefined historical fiction.  With Luna Park, he enters into the world of graphic fiction.

Not since Jonathan Hickman has a debut work seemed like such a fresh breath of air.  Hickman played with the nature of the comics medium; he used design and innovative prose formats to expand the language of the serial picture story.  The Nightly News, Pax Romana, and the rest of his independent output is groundbreaking, if you are looking for a similar experience in an original graphic novel this year, you should probably try Asterios Polyp.  Mazzuchelli, like Hickman, uses the format in new ways to create an interesting read.

Baker and Zezelj aren’t sleeping on innovative technique - the book does use art in a way this reader has never seen before (more on that later), but this tome is not a visual revelation like the work seen in this year’s most acclaimed graphic novel or in Red Mass for Mars.  What happens with the narrative here is much more subtle.

Baker weaves a fascinating political allegory pulling from the total history of Russia while making a statement about the present state and future of the United States, particularly commenting on the USA’s presence as an imperial power.

We meet Alik as a small time hood in the burnt out remains of Dreamland and the shell of Luna Park.  These are abandoned amusement parks in Coney Island that were once the epitome of the excess riches of the nation.  He’s a former soldier who fought in the Chechnyan conflict who is in a peculiar romance with a woman named Marina.  His lover happens to be a prostitute and, more then likely, a courtesan to the local Russian Mob boss.  Alik has fallen in love with the Tarot reading seductress and wants to save her from what he sees as a horrible destiny.  He wants to take her away to a place where they can live happily ever after.

Our protagonist is consumed by dreams of similar situations both before and during the war he fought back home.  Soon, the story begins to blur any semblance of linear progression and like a Steve Erickson novel, time and setting lose their meaning.  The love story becomes the only focus as it leads to a terrible betrayal and the reader witnesses a cyclical and doomed romance reverberating through history destroying political regimes and nations at will.

This is the kind of literary work that is very open to interpretive study.  Theses will be written about the political implications of the novel.  Term papers will correlate the burning of Dreamland, the fall of Czarist Russia, and the stab in the back legend of Germany with the loss of innocence in America.  At its ideological core, Luna Park is an incendiary commentary on the fragile state of the American Dream.  It is also a cautionary tale to politicians who would put gambits of intrigue before the good of the people and the country.

At first, it seems like Zezelj is the lesser of two creators in the book.  I don’t mean to say that the art is inferior.  In fact, it is probably the artist’s most fluid work to date.  What is of note is that in the opening salvo of the book there seems to be a large disconnect between the script and the art.  It reads more like an ambitiously illustrated novella than a graphic novel.  However, as the reader begins to be intoxicated by the story, the art slowly begins to intertwine with the words.  They begin to copulate and create a new entity - a story that is told through pictures as well as words.  One where neither element is more important than the other.  This builds until a sequence where a younger iteration of Alik is escorted into Dreamland in all its glory.  For those few pages, the art takes over and becomes the star as opposed to a supporting element.  Slowly, the pieces of the puzzle go back to the happy marriage where the entire meaning of a page can not be gleaned from text or lines alone.

Dave Stewart assists along the way, using various washes and strokes to give each period a distinct yet familiar feel.  Allowing the glimmer of the amusement parks to live when it is a bustling hub of all that this nation has to offer and casting long shadows when they are mere skeletons of a decaying beast being picked away at by the vultures of organized crime.

The complexity of the work makes it unlike any comic I have ever read.  Two readings in and I am unsure whether or not I am as clever as the book.  It lingers and haunts my mind.  Wondering what more can be extracted from the pages.  Fearing the hypnotic qualities of its dark prose and shadowy figures.  It has tainted every book I have read in the past few days.  Everything else seems paler and less substantial. It works like the best of David Lynch’s films - the reader becomes lost within its pages and slowly becomes an active participant in its archetypal fog.  It is a work that closed with a plaguing doubt and makes me question what it all means.  It is a brilliant and difficult book whose only flaw may be the ambiguity of its ending, but then that is what it is meant to do - make you think.

Luna Park is available from Vertigo Comics.  It is written by Kevin Baker and illustrated by Danijel Zezelj.  Colors by Dave Stewart.  $24.99