Scarlett Takes Manhattan
By Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt
Fugu Press
$12.95, 48 pp.
It's a little intimidating trying to write a review of Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt's graphic novel Scarlett Takes Manhattan while comics writer Warren Ellis's blurb stares at you from the cover. "Disgustingly wonderful," Ellis's reads quote, suggesting almost everything you need to know about the book like a piece of critical haiku. And Ellis is one who knows all about dredging the sewer for scraps of beauty, having done it himself in books like Transmetropolitan, a darkly-humored narrative about Spider Jerusalem, a futuristic Hunter S. Thompson type doing his best to make sense of a world where pop culture has finally grown fangs and politics has been reduced to mere farce.
In some ways, the world of Scarlett Takes Manhattan resembles that of Transmetropolitan thrown backwards into the Gilded Age, rather than the future. Both works are urban fantasies that traipse through the muck of their respective cities, turning a jaded, bemused eye upon the vice and corruption surrounding them. The major difference is that Transmetropolitan's humor amounted to a dirge for humanity. In contrast, if you were going to set Scarlett to music, it would be the lively, bawdy sound of burlesque, played on an ancient and slightly out-of-tune squeeze box.
(A moment here for full disclosure: John Leavitt sometimes writes book reviews for CarnalNation.)
The titular heroine is Scarlett O'Herring, born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan as Shifra Helfgott to a poor washer woman. Her story starts in tragedy: when Shifra is 18 years old, she suddenly finds herself an orphan when her mother gets crushed by a pair of elephants who decide to start fucking in the middle of a parade. Alone and destitute, she becomes chamber maid and mistress to her mother's former employer until an indiscreet parrot reveals their copious (and extremely imaginative) activities to his wife. A series of misadventures eventually brings her into the company of Daniel D'Lovely, a dapper dandy who leads her to stardom in vaudeville. D'Lovely teaches her the art of the con, fire breathing, burlesque, the implications of politics, and together they become, if not respectable citizens, then at least successful ones.
Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt are well-suited to this material. Although the portrait of 1890s New York in Scarlett is highly romanticized, the authors aren't just pulling their details out of thin air. Crabapple has built her name on a highly elaborate penciling style that draws heavily on vaudeville culture of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Her artwork is festive and alive, with swirling dynamic lines of deceptive intricacy. You could lose yourself for hours in Scarlett's coils of red hair on the front cover. They wind around each other and intertwine with the letters, implying the relentlessness of Scarlett's own passions and ambitions, whether in the bedroom, on the stage, or finally, with the city's politicians. Steampunk has been trendy for the last ten years or so, and there's been a fair share of mediocre stuff produced with that label precisely because there are so many people without any interest or faith in the source. Just toss in a few bodices and rusty gears, and you're ready to go. Crabapple has studied the visual fashions and styles, but also understands the spirit of the time as well. What I've always loved about her work is that although her pictures don't look like how a Victorian artist would have portrayed their world, they do seem to be true to the actual experience of looking at a Victorian world. Scarlett and Daniel's world is both filthy and exuberant at the same time: sidewalks are covered with dirt; rooms are choked with cigar smoke; bodies have freckles and blemishes, but the mortality of the characters and their environment only cranks the eroticism up to eleven.
As for Leavitt, he brings not only writing and dialogue to the collaboration, but he's well-read in the history of New York, as you can tell by his recent review of Kat Long's Forbidden Apple. His command of historical detail shows throughout Scarlett: when she gets kicked out of her job as a maid, the sweatshop that Scarlett winds up working at is an obvious reference to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which burned down in 1911, infamously killing almost 150 women and girls who worked there. The politician that she helps to build up and then bring down is a parody of Boss Tweed, the infamous head of the Tammany Hall machine that ruled New York in the late 19th-century. As with Crabapple's attention to visual detail, Leavitt's knowledge of the politics and culture brings the story that much further off the page. The story that they craft together is a lightweight, tongue-in-cheek one of a poor girl making good by being bad, but the reason that I've kept turning back and forth in it over the past couple of months that I've owned the book is that there is because there is so much more to see in the panels, and to imagine happening outside of them, than would seem to be offered by a bawdy version of a Horatio Alger tale. Here and there you catch glimpses of people and events that are happening beyond the scope of If there's something that's disgusting about Scarlett Takes Manhattan, it's that there isn't more of it. In the end, Scarlett feels very much like a preface to greater things, an introduction to a world and its characters. I want to see more of the details that are hinted at by Scarlett Takes Manhattan, and I hope that Crabapple and Leavitt will give them to us soon.
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