In his blog at The New Atlantis, Alan Jacobs posted recently on the use of comics in criticism. He singles out Alison Bechdel’s review of Jane Vandenburgh’s A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century: A Memoir in The New York Times for special praise, and I would have to agree with him. For Jacobs, Bechdel’s words and images “work together” to “provide a denser and more meaningful experience for the reader.” Indeed.

Unfortunately, this is not the case with Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle’s recent graphic history of the Beats. While the idea of the book is intriguing, its execution is rather disappointing.

The book begins with a ninety page history of the three major Beatniks–Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs–before it transitions into critical “perspectives” of the Beats. The first half of these “perspectives,” however, is a continuation of the history–dealing with so-called “minor” figures. The second half of the “perspectives,” which is to say, the last fifty pages of the book, is a mix of critical and thematic pieces.

Unlike Bechdel’s piece in The New York Times, in Pekar and Ed Piskor’s contributions to The Beats–which make up over two-thirds of the book–there is little interaction between the text and the images. I don’t know how Pekar and Piskor worked on the book, but judging by the final product, my guess would be separately. There is no collaborative synergy in The Beats. The images illustrate the text rather than help to tell the story.

Furthermore, almost all of the text is narration, and when there is dialogue it is largely there to provide direct emotional expression of the narration. Thus, in the narrative box, we read: “Kerouac flunked the test, but he still joined the Navy, only at the bottom, not as an officer.” In the image, a young Kerouac exclaims: “How could I have screwed up so badly?” This is the modus operandi throughout the bulk of the book and it creates the feeling that you are always reading it twice. While there are some images that are striking, the book does not break much new ground graphically. Indeed, much of The Beats is simply boring.

The book is also a bit of a strange muddle in terms of what it actually says about the Beats. It unashamedly sets out to glorify them. “There was,” Pekar and Buhle write, “never anything like them in American literature and American culture, and it is unlikely that there will ever be anything much like them again.” Their accomplishments, according to Pekar and Buhle, were legion. They “stood between the social collectivism of the Franklin D. Roosevelt years and the do-your-own-thingism of the 1960s,” “restored the role of the poet to the public space,” “renewed the thrill of discovery on their own terms” because of their heroic refusal to accept any predetermined ideology (except their own, of course), and now serve as beacons of individual freedom to young people worldwide.

Strangely, however, one of the main things that Pekar shows us is that while love was one of the mantras of the Beat generation, the love that the Beats showed was far from heroic. Rather it was often a megalomaniac self-love, expressed in sometimes beautiful, sometimes pitiful, forms.

In reading The Beats, I was reminded of William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1968 interview with Allen Ginsberg on Firing Line for PBS. Buckley’s first question to Ginsberg was whether he believed that the “hippies” were “an intimation of the new order.” Ginsberg does not respond to the question at first, but he comes back to it towards the end of the interview. Yes, the hippies are the beginning of a “New Order,” Ginsberg claims, but it is an order that is based on love.

This is all fine and good in theory, but, as Ginsberg himself shows, it is rather hard to put into practice. In the context of a discussion of the use of offensive language, Buckley asks Ginsberg why he cannot, out of “love” for others, avoid using such language: “if it would be offensive to some people to hear those words spoken, then you would presumably assume the burden of expressing yourself without using them.” Ginsberg claims he cannot do this, however, because it would conflict with his own agenda of freeing them from the constraints of the bourgeoisie–a freedom, of course, that he strongly desires for himself. Indeed, in his interview with Buckley, and on a number of other occasions, Ginsberg’s championing of love often seems to be less motivated by a desire to show love to others than by a desire to extract love from them. We are all guilty of this to some extent, and, of course, tend to avoid calling attention to it.

The focus of much of The Beats, however, whether it was intended or not, is on how self-centered many of these poets and novelists were–skilled in extracting love and attention from others, but giving little. In fact, sometimes Pekar makes the Beats look worse than they actually were, providing us with a rather stereotypical (and sometimes incorrect) image of them as drunk nihilist, hungry for literary and political fame and little else. The Beats did live very self-centered lives. However, whatever one thinks of their respective poems and novels, a number of which I think are important, their motives for writing were more complex than Pekar sometimes presents them. Thus, in writing a graphic history that aims to glorify the Beats, Pekar and Buhle come across as glorifying the Beats’ megalomania. They do provide some implicit criticism on occasion, but overall the history lacks balance.

“No one claims,” Pekar and Buhle write in their introduction, “this treatment to be definitive. But it is new, and it is vital.” I tend to disagree. While the book’s presentation of the Beats is certainly new, it is hardly vital. This is not to say that there are not some notable exceptions. Jeffrey Lewis’s and Tuli Kupferberg’s collaboration and Joyce Brabner’s contribution are, to my mind, worth working through. However, much of the rest of the book falls a bit flat.

Micah Mattix teaches English at the University of North Carolina.