Every novel is, in one way or another, about the passage of time, but Sammy Harkham’s comic-book epic “Blood of the Virgin” is more so than most. The book, the story of Seymour, an ambitious would-be filmmaker and a second-rate husband, explores different temporalities, creating a polyphony of the sweeping, legato past and the rhythmic present. There is also the tedium of family life and the structured frustration of making art. And, always, there is the choice to spend all-too-limited moments on one but not the other.
Harkham is adept at establishing the graphic equivalent of a musical time signature for each passage in his book. In a chapter called Palm Springs, in which Seymour is at work on a film, trying to fit as much as he can into his miserly shooting schedule, Harkham often uses a twenty-panel grid, many of the pictures an unforgiving two-inch square. Seymour is literally boxed in: he has to trim parts of his beloved screenplay to fit everything into the meagre hours he’s been given by his boss, Val Henry, to make his movie, and Harkham forces those hours to fit into a layout that is just as restrictive. When Seymour’s wife, Ida, is at home with only their baby boy, the panels tend to be larger and more generous, as if to hint that, when Ida is parenting, time passes more slowly. Sometimes, Harkham suggests, too slowly—child care, especially of small children, is boring, and it falls entirely to Ida because Seymour opts out. Ida is both lonely and desperate to break up the monotony of caring for an infant. At the beginning of one passage, she masturbates; at its end, she burns her hand in a kettle’s steam, deliberately.
For a little more than two decades, Harkham has been the best cartoonist around without a big graphic novel to his name. Since 2000, he has edited Kramers Ergot, an influential, irregularly published magazine that anthologizes his peers. And he has a book of wonderful short stories, “Everything Together.” But this book is the kind of signature achievement that was conspicuously missing from his rich body of work. Harkham published the first installment of “Blood of the Virgin” in 2010 in Crickets, a comics magazine distributed by Fantagraphics. Twelve years later, he published the final chapter of “Blood of the Virgin,” which takes up nearly all of Crickets #8. On the inside of the back cover, Harkham has drawn a one-page cartoon that seems to depict the way he feels about having finally finished the book: it shows him writing “the end” at his desk, getting into his car, and driving the car over a cliff. The first issue of Kramers was published the year Harkham turned twenty; now he’s forty-three and married with three kids.
“Blood of the Virgin” is a book about the discovery that family and art require the same resources. Seymour’s inexperience means that he will work too hard for too little. His eagerness marks him as easy prey for cynical moneymen—he’s a showbiz virgin, if you like—and he’s able to maintain his stamina and attention to his work only by neglecting his wife and son. The book’s title refers to the name of the movie Seymour is making, but the blood is also his own. Seymour loves to fight, both verbally and physically, but he always loses, because he’s inexperienced and doesn’t know when he’s outmatched. He is certain that his ambition will get him the resources and respect he needs to make something truly great, despite repeated humiliations, beatings, and spilled blood.
The book’s primary subjects are the mundane details of Seymour’s domestic life and artistic work. Twice, though, “Blood of the Virgin” leaps headlong into the past. Once, to Budapest in 1942, where we meet a happy young Jewish mother—a soon-to-be victim of tragedy. This is Ida’s mother; when we see her in New Zealand, she seems to be living a second, lesser life, and she has become hardened and watchful.
The other digression follows Joe Clayton, a discontented ranch hand, and his effortful rise to directorial stardom in early Hollywood. This is the only section printed in full color, and the story it tells is discrete from the rest of the book. Joe’s narrative offers a glimpse of what life might be for someone like Seymour if he were able to work unencumbered by tangled family ties and other distractions. Joe’s work in the movies is often depicted in layouts of the same restrictive squares that fence in Seymour. Unlike Seymour’s, it is wildly successful.
The movie business isn’t quite so magical anymore—a fact that one of Seymour’s filmmaker heroes, Myron Finkle, explains to him at the end of the book. Nobody’s “coming out west to be a mogul” the way Joe did. Such positions are already filled—and not by people like Seymour. Still, Seymour has one thing on Joe: his family. Joe wins an Oscar, but he winds up alone in a big, empty house looking out the window, consumed by his professional resentments. Seymour thinks that he’s not happy because he’s not a success; Harkham suggests that Seymour will be happy only if he emerges from his all-consuming film shoot with his family intact.
While in production, Seymour’s film is pregnant with possibility, but we don’t know much of what goes into it, and what we do know seems lurid and overwrought. The only thing of surpassing worth in “Blood of the Virgin” is Seymour and Ida’s son, Junior, whose presence hangs heavily over Seymour’s screwups. After a fight in the car, Ida takes Junior to visit her parents in New Zealand. “What am I going to do without you?” Seymour asks Ida at the airport. “I don’t want to know,” Ida replies.
With Ida and Junior gone, Seymour has time to work on his film. But it turns out that the pressure of family life wasn’t holding Seymour back: in his wife and child’s absence, Seymour is free to fail miserably at politicking and partying—two important parts of filmmaking, he learns. Val takes the film away from Seymour before he’s done shooting and forbids him to edit it. In response, Seymour drives to Val’s mansion to confront him in the name of artistic excellence. When he arrives, he finds that Val is having a wrap party that he wasn’t invited to. When Seymour tries to get tough with a producer, he is pushed down the stairs.
Like the color section of “Blood of the Virgin,” Seymour’s story ends in a big, empty house. But he doesn’t end up alone. After his film is wrested from him, he manages to hang on to Ida and to Junior—partly by luck, partly by redirecting some of his bottomless determination to succeed toward his family. By this point, we’ve often seen Seymour editing, concentrating on cutting together little pictures that might, with a lot of help, make a work of art. If the work is any good, it will seem like real people live inside it, and the sequence of the little pictures will imitate the passage of time. But time also passes for the artist. For people who toil outside the frames of a filmstrip or a comic-book panel, the act of making art, the absence and weakness its pressures can excuse, might be utterly destructive. Or, given some grace from our partners or kids, a little self-knowledge, maybe even a serendipitous failure, it might not. ♦