The Mysterious, Magical Mind of Nate Powell

How does this happen? An artist, Nate Powell, who holds the distinction as the first cartoonist ever to win the National Book Award (for the John Lewis authored civil rights era March trilogy) follows that project up with a mysterious (even spooky) graphic novel about an “intentional community” in the Ozarks.

Come Again by Nate Powell comes as a surprise. As I was reading my advance copy this summer, I kept asking myself, “How did Nate ever move towards this project after finishing March?” It’s so odd, so surreal at times. It’s risky.

If you’re looking for LOTS of insights (with Powerpoint slides) on the origins of the book, how it came to be, I recommend watching the Livestream of his talk at the Fayetteville Public Library. Then listen to this Ozarks at Large interview with the author.

Nate’s an Arkansas native. He grew up in North Little Rock. So I’m sure he’ll be happy any review of his book links back to the media and libraries in Arkansas participating in the launch of his new project. So I should also call out Nightbird Books!

His book is about back-to-the-landers. Consider this post a back-to-local-media moment.

So, again, why set his next graphic novel in Northwest Arkansas, in a community that pretty obviously is based on small hippie communities a few miles up mountain from Eureka Springs?

Well, for one, it means locating a story in a geographical locale between wretched white-supremacist  havens, the hippie crystals tourist trap (Eureka Springs), and a progressive liberal southern university mecca (Fayetteville).

But in the woods. In the 1970s.

It’s true, Arkansas is a place people go to to get lost. Especially in the 70s, when the back-to-the-land movement was in full swing.

But Powell reminds us this back-to-the-land movement was related to some other cultural moments.

Like punk music. So he includes slides of the band-leaders of Crass, who apparently are founders of punk and also went back to the land in England in the 70s, and have been there ever since.

And the Sex Pistols had one brief tour in the United States, first in Atlanta, then with a stop in Tulsa, and that Tulsa stop inspired an emerging punk music scene in Fayetteville, Arkansas in 1979 (it’s worth watching the livestream just to hear Powell’s story about this Sex Pistols concert–think teenagers and cowboy fathers at a Sex Pistols concert–what can go wrong?).

But how is all of this related to “a haunting tale of intimacy, guilt, and collective amnesia”?

It’s difficult to answer this question without introducing spoilers. So let’s just say, in the same way there seems to be a collective willful amnesia in our culture about how bad things are (fa

scism? what fascism? hey, let’s all talk about how great the Dow Jones Industrial Average is doing!), in the novel, an important thing is forgotten, and the one person who attempts to remember it sacrifices much to do so.

Those of us who live in Fayetteville might wonder whether the secret at work in Powell’s book is secretly a reference to the secret of Northwest Arkansas. We’re no longer a “best-kept-secret.” Northwest Arkansas is growing by leaps and bounds, and risks going the way of Austin or other cities where immense growth has also meant loss and change (thanks to my friend Jonathan Perrodin for this insight).

What would we be willing to sacrifice to keep Fayetteville a secret? Can you keep a city “funky” once everyone knows about it? Are we willing to be forgotten in order to save what is lost?

For those who read the book, there are some things to know. First, Powell typically works in black and white, but here he goes black and white and just a bit more color. There’s a code to it. It’s carefully thought out. And the color scheme is designed to look like the cover of Black Sabbath’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. For real. Because that’s how Nate Powell rolls.

There aren’t just a couple of layers of cultural reference in his work. There are layers and layers of narrative and visual art connected, from Irish gods to Ursula Le Guin, from Judas Priest to obscure Australian horror films. I think for Powell connections are as important as visuals.

I’m not even kidding about St. Patrick. Here’s St. Patrick kicking Crom Cruach, a god brought from Ethiopia to Ireland. There’s a demon kind of like this in the book. But St. Patrick doesn’t kick it.

Come Again leaves me incredibly proud to call Nate Powell a native son of Arkansas. There’s a level of creative engagement here that inspires. Not only does Powell creatively layer his work with all these references. He also builds the art over long stretches of time (this graphic novel was ten years in the making).  And he takes a risk. After the straight-forward and powerful narrative artistically rendered in March, one might think Powell would continue the straight ahead. But he doesn’t. He goes left to go right (thanks Doc Hudson).

And finally, the novel leaves us thinking, spiritually and emotionally, because of its unanswered questions. Nate says he is happy when he doesn’t have all the answers for us. This is one of those stories that will leave you dissatisfied, but for good reasons.

At the conclusion of his talk, one audience member asked, “What should I do if me and my friends want to start a comic book? How can we get published?”

Powell’s advice: 1) Create your body of work. Write and write and get it together. 2) Keep publishing it. Stay on schedule (he and friends started out publishing comics off a mimeograph machine, and committed to a new issue every sixty days). 3) Show up at comics conventions.

This last one, showing up, is especially huge. In publishing, as in much of life, its not the aspiration as much as it is the doing of it, and who you know.

Register for a convention, set up your table, sell a few comics, give away a bunch, and meet people. Now you’re part of it. Much the same can be said of blogging. Lots of people start. Only a few keep at it. And often in writing its the personal connections that make the difference.

I got to meet Powell briefly today at his talk. Tonight I’ll be messaging him on Twitter. And sending him a link to this blog.

Mostly, I’m going to thank him for taking the risk of telling such an odd and out-of-the-way tale. I wonder what cave or mine he dug it up from. I hope to visit it some day, so I can be in on his secret.

If this is your first exposure to Nate Powell, I suggest you go read the March Trilogy right away. Then read everything else. But be prepared, Come Again will worm its way into you in ways that will leave you changed. Kind of like punk music and Ursula Le Guin.