Comic erudition: R. Crumb meets Kafka. (Culture Watch).

March 2002 was the tenth anniversary of a smart and smart-alecky publishing venture called the Introducing series. Longtime readers of Frank McConnell's Commonweal columns know of "graphic novels," that is, comic books that tell complex adult stories. Well, any Introducing entry is a "graphic" exposition of a complex subject: mathematics, Kafka, the universe, Darwin, cyberspace, Keynes, Jesus, Wagner, postmodernism, Stephen Hawking--you name it. Anything discussed at a semi-intellectual cocktail party or in a faculty dining room is covered by the Introducing series, the brainchild of Richard Appignanesi. His Icon Books launched the series under the British label, Beginners. Macmillan is the distributor in England, while in the United States the series goes under the Totem Books imprint (www.iconbooks.co.uk/about.cfm).

The books are fun, and fairly substantial fun at that. The Darwin volume was my initiation, and my first surprise was how much text there was. Indeed, in all the best entries, pictures never replace words when words are truly needed. Instead, the pictures, by making personalities and places concrete, pungent, and humorous, free the writers to deal with sheer ideas economically. For instance, in the Mathematics entry, the God-fearing Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler's encounter with the hardheaded atheist Diderot is illustrated because it is a dramatic, funny episode that should be pictured. The peruked thinkers stand side by side, leaning on their eighteenth-century walking sticks, their faces set in ironic expressions as dialogue balloons issue from their heads, giving us the following exchange:

Diderot: "I challenge the pious Euler to produce a mathematical proof of the existence of God."

Euler: "Sir, (a+b)/n=x, hence, God exists. Reply!"

And the caption beneath reads: "Diderot was dumbfounded and fled back to the safety of the Paris salons." But when Euler conceives of a particularly ingenious formula that plays no part in any amusing anecdote, it is analyzed in a tight, dense little paragraph, not kidded or diluted by funny pictures. In other words, pictures know their place in these books. To concepts they lend "a local habitation and a name" (Euler's eighteenth-century garb and his pugnacious encounters), but they don't reduce abstractions to pabulum.

Still, the question must be asked, what can the reader get from the graphic format that he or she wouldn't get from a concise, well written, all-print exposition?

First, there is a kind of kibitzing, rowdy, in-your-face, razzing comedy that has always been a specialty of the cartoonist and caricaturist and is part of the emotional vocabulary of any American who spent part of childhood reading Mad magazine or National Lampoon. Introducing uses this sort of humor to teach.

For instance, in Introducing Darwin, the text informs us that the naturalist Lamarck theorized that the habits of a creature would lead to a change in its anatomy. Meanwhile, the pictures show us a Dr. Lamarck who is a crane, whose long legs, according to Lamarckian wisdom, came from its need to stretch itself above the water's surface. And this distinguished scientist-crane makes his first appearance on a rising escalator because, according to Lamarckian doctrine, "all creatures were caught up in the struggle to become as complicated as men." Later in the book, Darwin begins to look suspiciously like an ape.

The second strength of the Introducing series is its economy of coverage. It is no simple task to outline a discipline from its inception to its current status, but this series does a plucky job. It's good to know a vast terrain from high above before you are set down on the ground to negotiate intellectual hills and precipices. At the beginning of the Heidegger volume, we are given a twenty-five-page "greatest hits" of Western philosophy, from Plato to Husserl, which, of course, reduces the works of all these thinkers to a few epitomizing quotes. Nevertheless, by the time the "greatest hits" have been played, we understand that the thing all these philosophers have in common, a human-centered worldview, was also exactly what Heidegger rejected. Now we are ready for the rest of the book, Heidegger's onslaught on this concept.

The series has its flaws. The humor, usually genial and pertinent, can get sophomoric; the generalizations can become too sweeping; and certain volumes didn't receive much proofreading. (Readers of Introducing Cyberspace will be startled to learn that Cicero lived around 2000 b.c.--careful with those zeros, guys.) Worst of all is the way a postmodern, Western-world bashing reductionism has crept into the series. Again from Cyberspace: "As European culture and scholarship became standardized, madness was invented ... wandering fools were thus a symptom of the narrowing of `normal' behavior, their experience and knowledge denied value, in the same way as heretics." Thanks a lot, Michel Foucault.

But even if the series were a hundred times worse than it is, much could be forgiven it for the sake of Introducing Kafka, written by David Zane Mairowitz and illustrated by--oh, Gilbert finding his Sullivan! oh, Mutt finding his Jeff!--Robert Crumb. Yes, that R. Crumb, Natural Man R. Crumb, Fritz the Cat R. Crumb, Head Comix R. Crumb. Because of his art, supported by Mairowitz's cogent text (which, not incidentally, insists on the painfully comic aspect of Kafka's work), this title goes far beyond being explication or popularization or survey. Introducing Kafka is a work of art in its own right, a very rare example of what happens when one very idiosyncratic artist absorbs another into his worldview without obliterating the individuality of the absorbed one. (Offhand, I can think of only two other examples: Fellini's cannibalization of Petronius in Satyricon, and Berg's musicalization of Buchner in Woyzeck.)

Introducing Kafka works as biography, as critical interpretation, and as storytelling. No more than any of the other Introducing titles does this one pretend to give you what a lengthy, purely verbal book could. But the art work by Crumb produces a version of Kafka's world--both the real Prague and the strange cities of his fiction--that is simultaneously European and American, redolent of the 1920s and the 1990s, filled with Kafka's insurmountable neuroses yet also possessed by the all-American, self-help vision of health as an always viable option. Crumb's visualization of Kafka's father accurately captures the overpowering, bullying presence of the man, yet this Hermann Kafka is also one of Crumb's typically sweaty and salivating slobs, with the sweat and the saliva flying in all directions as Hermann bullies and bellows at the dinner table. The women of Kafka's life and fiction, as drawn here, have exactly that mixture of self-command, tantalizing knowingness, and sly sexuality found in the fiction, and they are also R. Crumb females in their amazonian randiness and thick-limbed physicality. When Kafka dispatches one of his heroes to "Amerika," the Kafka and Crumb visions become virtually indistinguishable, since Crumb's native land has always been Amerika.

It may even be unfair to say that Introducing Kafka is the best of this series. The other entries are all previews and purviews of vast fields of knowledge, while the Crumb/Mairowitz masterpiece is an American descendant of its own subject. Though you'll certainly want to read The Trial and The Castle after finishing this comic book introduction, you may also feel that Crumb and Mairowitz have already taken you into Kafka territory, and parts of the landscape look strangely American.