Hemingway in Comics by David K. Elder et al. (review)

Hemingway in Comics is a visually stunning catalog of Hemingway appearances in the medium, from 1950s caricatures to contemporary graphic novels. As David K. Elder notes in the book's introduction, he "started collecting Hemingway references in popular culture, including more than 40 appearances in comic books" (x) as part of the research for another book project, Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park (2016).¹ Finding Hemingway in comic books became a project in and of itself for Elder, and his catalog of comics adaptations and representations of Hemingway has grown to the over 120 works itemized in this volume, often with full-color illustrations.

Like Elder's earlier book Hidden Hemingway, as well as Matthew J. Bruccoli's Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame (2005) and David K. Earle's All Man!: Hemingway, 1950s Men's Magazines, and the Masculine Persona (2009), Hemingway in Comics showcases archival objects and, in this case, comics art, complementing the book's biographical and contextual explications of each Hemingway comic book appearance with a visual reference point. This gives the reader a wealth of Hemingway images to mull over. Certain trends become immediately apparent in Elder's comic books, such as the familiar tropes of the hard-drinking, brawling Hemingway of the 1920s, and the stoic, tragic philosopher Hemingway of the 1950s and 1960s. Elder even opens Hemingway in Comics with a first chapter titled "A Note About That Sweater," about the 1957 Yousuf Karsh photograph of Hemingway wearing a Christian Dior cable-knit sweater: "For Superman, it's the giant S on his chest. For John Lennon, it' a New York City T-shirt. For Ernest Hemingway, it's a bulky turtleneck sweater. So many comic book artists have adapted this image that it deserves an exploration of why it's so iconic" (1). Accumulating examples from across global comics, Elder's book strives to explore the production of icons like "Hemingway in a Sweater," as they become familiar tropes in our visual culture.

Written for a general readership, Hemingway in Comics is at once a bibliography, an exhibition catalog (though there was no physical exhibition, it nonetheless has that structure and style), and a study of visual iconography. For Hemingway aficionados who might not be familiar with the vibrant world of contemporary comics art, there are wonderful gems cataloged in this book that any Hemingway enthusiast should read. For example, the Norwegian cartoonist Jason's The Left Bank Gang uses the iconic 1920s Left Bank to reimagine Hemingway as a cartoon dog who organizes a heist with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Jason blends adaptations of Hemingway's stories, such as the scene in A Moveable Feast when Hemingway inspects Fitzgerald's penis, to determine if "it's too little," with hard-boiled genre tropes. In Hemingway in Comics, Jace Gatzemeyer's chapter on Jason's work stands out for detailing not just Hemingway's representation as a character in The Left Bank Gang, but also the deeper, aesthetic connections between Hemingway's minimalist modernism and the art of comics. Transformed on Jason's comics page into a subtle, spare series of nine uniformly rectangle panels, Hemingway and Fitzgerald's storied homo-social intimacy, as one inspects the other's junk, slows time down, becomes estranged due to the "funny animal" cartoons, and resonates as a moment of care and machismo, tenderness and threat, openness and reluctance. It's beautiful, and Hemingway in Comics has uncovered and made these available to readers who may not have encountered "art comics" of this sort that adapt, refine, and make contemporary the image of Hemingway.

The global range of Hemingway in Comics reinforces the transnational reach of Hemingway's persona as well as his writings. The earliest cartoons in Elder's book are from the United States: cartoons from Hemingway's 1917 high school yearbook; a brief Hemingway cameo in Captain Marvel Adventures #110 (1950); a...