« I can’t decide whether to give up peanut butter on account of its calories, or to eat it on account of its vitamines… »

When it comes to what Amazon loosely classifies as ‘literary graphic novels’ (very much a meaningless category), it’s rare for me to stumble across something completely unfamiliar on a bookstore shelf, unless of course it’s something hot off the press. Denys Wortman’s New York: Portrait of the City in the 30s and 40s (Drawn & Quarterly*, 2010), which I spotted in the well-stocked The Comic Hunter (Moncton, Canada), looked unfamiliar and intriguing. 

I’d never heard of Wortman, but just a quick skim through this volume showed that he clearly had an amazing ability to evoke a certain place and time, and fill it up with characters so real that one wouldn’t be surprised to run into them on the street. Nostalgia for a place one never experienced is a recurring feature of the human mind – Wortman’s New York is one I am familiar with from books and movies, and that faded away long before I was born. One would also be remiss in failing to express admiration for DW’s living, breathing linework. His attention to the minutest details are used to recreate scenes from lives of people who certainly didn’t have an easy time of it, yet still inspire a sort of familiar comfort almost a hundred years later.

To get some bibliographical stuff out of the way (for a full story, I shall direct you to the website maintained by Wortman’s eighth son), Denys Wortman was born in 1887 and died in 1958 at 71. Among other things, he also drew Metropolitan Movies, a comic strip that ran between 1924 and 1954 and is mostly remembered (if that’s the right term here) for two of its characters, a couple of cheerful vagrants named Mopey Dick and the Duke.  

It was a tad difficult to decide which pages to feature, so I tried to go for a variety of scenery. Wortman must have been a Gerald Kersh character to possess such an intimate knowledge of all these industries, markets, streets, and types of human beings… I invite you to a bit of time travel.

« In art school days there was much talk about “character,” but I feel there was a small amount of misapprehension mixed up with its interpretation. I could not see then and I can’t now why a man with a lot of whiskers has any more character than one who is clean-shaven. Nevertheless I would prefer to draw the former. And I would prefer to draw him after he has lived long enough for Experience to have etched lines in his face — the more the better. Because the more lines and markings he has in his face the more chance I have of finding ones that I can match with lines on my paper to help create the illusion that the face I am drawing has bones under the skin, that the eyes are seeing things, that the mouth is speaking, and that the man has a soul. »

It must be mentioned that these drawings have been rescued from the mists of forgetful time by WOT favourite James Sturm (see Free Inside Package: James Sturm’s The Cereal Killings (1992-95)), who hunted down Wortman’s son and his astonishingly large, apparently languishing archive of his dad’s illustrations.

I’ll end this with a great quote from the foreword to Denys Wortman’s New York, written by Robert W. Snyder —

« You can still see traces of Wortman’s New York in crowded Manhattan side streets, spirited New Deal Murals, and soaring skyscrapers**. Harder to find are the feelings and lived memories of this place. The sailors and their sweethearts who strolled the boardwalks of Coney Island are now, in their eighties, a fading presence. To understand them, and how they lived in a city that inspired hope and fear, idealism and wisecracks, solidarity and individuality, there is no better place to look than a Denys Wortman cartoon. »

~ ds

* I tend to not like what D&Q publishes, but this is another pleasant exception to the rule (here’s the original exception).

** This immediately comes to mind.