THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, August 8, 1996 TAG: 9608080036
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ROGER K. MILLER
LENGTH: 78 lines
IN ``DERBY DUGAN'S Depression Funnies,'' Tom De Haven has created a parallel universe of the 1930s. Or maybe he's only rearranged the decade slightly. Either way, it's a highly diverting time and place for readers of the '90s to spend a few hours.
The novel is about newspaper comic strips, a subject that De Haven, a teacher at Richmond's Virginia Commonwealth University, knows well. A previous novel, ``Funny Papers,'' dealt with the industry in its infancy, the 1890s.
The current novel, the author says, owes its existence in considerable part to Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist-author of ``Maus.'' Spiegelman had read ``Funny Papers'' and liked it so much that he encouraged De Haven in his plan to write another novel about comics. This would be of little interest to the reader if Spiegelman hadn't also promised to illustrate it. But he did, and the 1930s-style comic characters that adorn the cover, frontispiece and running page-heads capture the period atmosphere as neatly as De Haven's words do.
De Haven takes certain real-life people and phenomena and assigns them to his fictional creations Derby Dugan is the brainchild of cartoonist Walter Geebus, who hates President Franklin Roosevelt. Derby is a 14-year-old orphan who, with his talking dog, Fuzzy, goes around the country getting into scrapes, righting wrongs and fulminating against FDR and the New Deal.
You don't have to be a history Ph.D. to recognize cartoonist Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie and her dog Sandy there. In the 1930s, they happily performed stout Republican service for Col. Robert R. McCormick, arch-conservative publisher of The Chicago Tribune.
Other instances of his creative historical revisionism include comic books. They actually were born at this time, though in De Haven's version they came from the foresight of Milt Kamen, operator of a cartooning sweat shop.
Milt is a wily opportunist and sometime employer of Al Bready, the novel's first-person narrator. Al is a writer. He writes anything, as long as he can write it fast. He writes radio scripts. He writes a 75,000-word novel every Sunday for Thrilling Marriage magazine.
And he writes ``Derby Dugan'' for Walter Geebus, for which he receives $30 a week. It isn't much, but Al loves this goofy industry of comic strips as much as De Haven does.
The author evokes the raffishness of the industry in this, its Golden Age, when people reacted to their favorite comics with perhaps even more passion than they do today to TV shows. Certain strips were wildly popular (as ``Derby Dugan'' is), and their characters became very real to readers. Some cartoonists' fame was so great it drove them to distraction, drink or even suicide, the way it does rock stars now.
The period feel is the kind you get in the grittiness of Raymond Chandler's stories, or the vague menace in James M. Cain, or the wan hopelessness in Nathanael West. In the reader's mind, there is in Al's bleak bachelor hotel room a bare light bulb burning at the end of a ratty electrical cord suspended from the ceiling.
All of this would be little more than melodramatized history if it weren't for the relationships, specifically Al's - with Geebus, which is one of love/hate, and with Jewel Rodgers, which is one of love, pure and simple.
Al and Jewel yearn for each other, but alas, their love cannot be. Jewel is married to Jimmie Rodgers, to whom she is forlornly devoted because of a head injury he received for which she feels responsible. (It makes him say everything twice.) Al must love her, if not from afar, then at least from arm's length.
And there was one other vital relationship: Al and Geebus with ``Derby Dugan.'' Once they came ``this close'' to making high art with that strip. But they missed. The attempt is probably what killed Geebus. For Al, it was the beginning of the void. MEMO: Roger K. Miller, former book editor for The Milwaukee Journal, is
a free-lance writer in Grafton, Wis. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
BOOK REVIEW
``Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies''
Author: Tom De Haven
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt.
290 pp.
Price: $23. by CNB