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NAKED CITY:  A Graphic Novel. Eric Drooker. Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Books, 2024. 329pp. $29.99.

Guest Review by Paul Buhle

For many an aged connoisseur of film and television history, the title of Eric Drooker’s new comic conjures up fond, familiar images. A 1948 film offered the nearest Hollywood approach to Italian “New Realism,” and was directed by Jules Dassin,a left-wing film director about to flee the US and the blacklist for a legendary role in Greece (think Never On Sunday). On the surface a mere “policier,” it captured the grit of Manhattan as a manufacturing city, including a police chase on foot through crowds of working class types, never seen in quite this way before or perhaps after. “Naked City” made a titular reappearance for good reasons, one of the finest “New York Era” television efforts (1958-63) which began each episode with a vivid view of Manhattan, and plots that often featured police as social workers dealing sympathetically with broken lives.

Drooker himself actually fled New York for Berkeley, decades ago. But he co-founded the annual, hard-hitting anthology World War III Illustrated before departing, and has returned spectacularly—in his dreams, that is.

We are in the world of existential experience. Artists and musicians trying to make a living and make their way and also find some kind of companionship, where possible. Street scenes, park scenes, people who aren’t nearly as dangerous or unfriendly as they look, and cops who are a lot more casually brutal than the press would have us believe. Drooker, as in an earlier Manhattan GN, Flood, does not need much dialogue and some pages have hardly any at all.

Let’s try another analogy. One of the most useful observations of European art historians generations ago captured a crucial turn away from narrow religious art. For a thousand years, more or less, painters had drawn human beings at close quarters, engaged in one or another religious expression. And then, not necessarily for non-religious purposes, the landscape began to appear as something in itself, something to  be seen, reflected upon, captured in art.

It was a giant step forward, anticipating the following steps in which humans would reappear but in a new light. Bruegel was already there, in a sense, but by the nineteenth century, a flood of art, more and more secular, placed ordinary people in ordinary lives. Or exotic people in their ordinary lives somewhere far from the Euro-centered world. Only one step remained, in the lowly comic pages of the yellow press, to allow ordinary as well as extraordinary people to talk, make jokes, swear, and generally carry on.

Thus comic art, long unrecognized as any kind of art. Drooker brings us back to landscapes, but as cityscapes. Interiors and exteriors alike, not to mention the subway caverns, not to mention music venues. Not to mention balmy days, and snowstorm days, tenement to public park.

The plot is fairly thin and the characters not developed with notable complexity because Drooker wishes to direct the reader’s attention elsewhere. Our protagonist, a young woman coming from a rough background, has aspirations as a singer. She naturally can’t pay even a meager rent without finding some kind of work when nearly every kind is obnoxious as well as unrewarding. By accident, she becomes an artist’s model and we enter the world of the artist himself.

Here, any comic art volume will poke around a little, raising inevitable analogies to the comic artist’s own artistic vision, work and troubles. This guy is more than a generation older than our protagonist, has no apparent sexual designs upon her but also no sense of a career more successful than following his agent or exhibitor’s advice. He may not come to a happy ending because hardly anyone does here. The City is rough on the ordinary aspirant to artistic fame or even relative stability. The lonely streets are too dangerous, just for starters.

She is lucky enough to escape the worst dangers except the sense of being alone in a world of skyscrapers, tenements and offices. She is lucky enough to be recognized as a singer with talent. But something is definitely missing.

Drooker is a socialist and environmentalist as his art has always explained to readers. He does not thump any key here, no political causes are highlighted, if the plight of the working stiff is always on display. He is pointing in another direction. She is undocumented and in that way always endangered,  her memories of her family’s political persecution in Mexico stand for themselves, part of a past that she has left behind except in wistful moments.

She is, finally, one more stranger in the metropolis. Like millions of others facing the same dangers, including deportation. And with similar hopes. She is not allowed her own special songs to them. But she endures.

Actually, it is the Yiddish language short stories and novels about Manhattan from the 1890s to the 1940s that seem the closest to Drooker. Strangers in a language that will remain forever alien West of the Hudson. Inclined toward visionary social solutions based on culture as much as politics, the artist, even the ordinary lover of art, group-music singer or musician to film-maker and even cartoonist, those curious Jews left a mighty legacy that Drooker follows.

Then again, Drooker could also be seen in Tompkins Square Park, where Allen Ginsberg discovered his art on anti-gentrification posters, introduced himself to the artist and began a process that culminated in a Drooker/Ginsberg collaboration of poetry and comics. Quite something to remember. And again, quite the city saga.

Ginsberg discovered Drooker as Drooker had discovered Ginsberg. Together—which is to say a new collection of Ginsberg’s poetry illustrated by Drooker, published in 2006—they created a unique comic. We can appreciate the partnership best with Ginsberg’s words, from Drooker’s website:

Essay by Allen Ginsberg

Drooker’s Illuminations

I first glimpsed Eric Drooker’s odd name on posters pasted on fire-alarm sides, construction walls checkered with advertisements, & lamppost junction boxes in the vortex of Lower East Side Avenues leading to Tompkins Square Park, where radical social dislocation mixed homeless plastic tents with Wigstock transvestite dress-up anniversaries, Rastas sitting on benches sharing spliff, kids with purple Mohawks, rings in their noses ears eyebrows and bellybuttons, adorable or nasty skinheads, wives with dogs & husbands with children strolling past jobless outcasts, garbage, and a bandshell used weekly for folk-grunge concerts, anti-war rallies, squatters’ rights protests, shelter for blanket-wrapped junkies & winos and political thunder music by Missing Foundation, commune-rockers whose logo, an overturned champagne glass with slogan “The Party’s Over,” was spray-painted on sidewalks, apartments, brownstone and brick walled streets.

Eric Drooker’s numerous block-print-like posters announced much local action, especially squatters’ struggles and various mayoral-police attempts to destroy the bandshell & close the Park at night, driving the homeless into notoriously violence-corrupted city shelters. Tompkins Park had a long history of political protest going back before Civil War anti-draft mob violence, memorialized as “. . . a mixed surf of muffled sound, the atheist roar of riot,” in Herman Melville’s The Housetop: A Night Piece (July 1863).

Paul Buhle