Review time! with ‘Dragman’

“Here comes Dick, he’s wearing a skirt; here comes Jane, y’know she’s sporting a chain”

In the back of this comic, Steven Appleby writes a short essay about his life wearing women’s clothing, and how long it took him to fully embrace it (it wasn’t until he was 50 before he started dressing as a woman full-time), so it’s not surprising this comic centers on August Crimp, a man who, when he wears women’s clothing, can fly. Crimp, obviously, decides (reluctantly) to be a superhero, so he calls himself Dragman and starts doing superhero things (technically, the media names him, a name he finds ridiculous, but as another hero tells him, once the media names you, it sticks). Of course, there are problems, and Appleby gets to all of that, believe you me. Dragman, which is published by Metropolitan Books (which is part of Henry Holt, which is part of Macmillan), is a brilliant distillation of the superhero ideal, using that to tell a wonderfully humanistic story.

A story like this already has the potential to be rife with metaphor, and Appleby milks that for all it’s worth without being obnoxious about it – just telling the story the way he tells it brings up metaphorical interpretations of it. He adds an extra twist, that people in this world can sell their souls, and there’s a brisk trade in that. So we get superheroes and soulless people, dressing up as women and dressing up in costumes, and Appleby wrangles a compelling story out of this. Appleby begins with a short prose section, in which a transvestite is found, murdered, as has been happening for some time. He returns to the prose to tell the story of the murderer and how he feels about his victims, which adds a good amount of creepiness to the story. Presumably Appleby does this so he doesn’t have to draw a shadowy figure to keep the killer’s identity secret, but who knows – maybe he just does it to break things up a bit. Only then does he introduce August Crimp, but he does so after Crimp has given up being a superhero because he met a woman and married her, a woman whose parents died during a superhero battle. Crimp is ashamed of wearing women’s clothing and ashamed of being a superhero, so even when his wife finds some of his old clothes and he tells her about the former, he doesn’t tell her about the latter. It’s an interesting twist on the secret identity – Crimp discovers that it doesn’t matter to his wife (in another layer of metaphor, she’s called Mary Mary) if he dresses like a woman, but she hates superheroes, so that’s the part of his life he needs to keep hidden longer.

Crimp has known for years that he liked women’s clothing, and he’s also known that dressing that way gives him the power of flight, but he kept that part of his life a secret because he was ashamed of it. One day, while he’s dressed as a woman at a museum, he sees a neighbor girl he knows playing with a doll, and when she falls off the roof of the museum (there’s a café up there), he saves her and comes to the attention of the press. Another hero, Dog Girl (who can literally turn into a dog and also has the senses of a dog even when she’s human), takes Crimp to the superhero club, where she gets him to apply for membership. In this world, superheroes must be approved, and some people have superhero insurance (one of the heroes doesn’t save a person because they don’t have insurance). Crimp, however, discovers prejudice inside the world of superheroes, as the Fist – who we never see out of costume and so we never see his face – thinks Crimp is a pervert and does all he can to keep Dragman out of the group. Meanwhile, the girl Crimp saved, who’s grown a bit (the book jumps back and forth over three years), asks Crimp, whose secret she’s kept, to help her regain her parents’ souls, which they sold. And a superhero is missing, and Dog Girl wants Dragman to help her find him. And there’s the killer, of course. All of these threads do have to do with each other, and Appleby does a good job braiding them all together eventually.

As I noted above, the story is layered with metaphors. Crimp’s mother, who is not in the book very much, is shown as disapproving of his desire to wear women’s clothing, but she has multiple secrets of her own and it’s implied that perhaps she has a good reason for not wanting him to wear them. The superhero who disappears, Hindsight, can only see the past, which he thinks is a lousy power (especially because he can’t see really traumatic things like crimes being committed), but which turns out to be a hinge around which the story revolves. Hindsight is hiding a secret, too (well, a lot of them, but one particularly relevant to Crimp). A good deal of the book centers on the club where Crimp can be free to dress as he wants, and where royal marines and policemen can dress like women without worrying about being outed. This is another layer – both those professions wear uniforms, generally, and perform good deeds (again, very generally), so we can see them as superheroes as well, but ones who have a secret identity different from the ones superheroes have. Crimp is only a superhero when he dresses as a woman, so a metaphorical reading of the text would imply that his “superhero clothes” – women’s clothing – should be his regular clothes, but Appleby isn’t as facile as that, because Crimp seems happy as a married man with a young son. He is dragged back into the “life,” and while he eventually embraces it, Appleby doesn’t judge him for not wearing women’s clothes for three years while he got married and became a father. Appleby implies that people do compromise, but that there’s not anything wrong with that. It’s interesting to read, because these days we embrace a “Be Yourself No Matter What!” mantra, but life isn’t always that simple. Crimp loves Mary and his son (Gulliver, another nice name choice), and he seems perfectly happy as a man. He’s happy dressing in women’s clothing, too, and his navigation of these desires is what makes the book more than just a superhero epic.

There’s also the idea of selling your soul, which is common practice in the book. A scientist discovered the soul some time earlier, and companies – one company in particular – do a brisk trade in them, although early on in the book, no one seems to know how they make it profitable. The literal selling of a soul can also be read metaphorically – people become less human, and they become consumed by material things, but Appleby makes a sly point that it’s the desire for material things that makes them want to sell their soul in the first place, so how different are they, really? Plus, the idea of selling your soul is common when we talk of compromising – and Crimp is compromising in the beginning, as he’s “sold his soul” so he can have a “normal” life. As I noted, Appleby doesn’t make it easy, and Crimp “selling his soul” by putting away his clothing is not seen as a completely sad event. It becomes a metaphor a bit for growing up, which Appleby then undercuts by showing Crimp grow up even more by accepting that part of himself. With the essay in the back, it’s clear that evolution is a key component to the way Appleby has lived, and Crimp does this as well. It’s why someone like the Fist, who’s obviously an example of a retrograde way of thinking, never changes. It’s why the killer is so disturbing, because he seems to be someone who has impulses like Crimp or even the Fist, but subverts them to appear “normal,” gaining a release through angry sex and murder. Crimp figures out a way to live that contains all the sides of his personality. The killer fails, and that’s one reason why he kills.

Appleby’s art has that cartoony and rough look that would not fly at all in traditional superhero stories, but it also has that quirky charm that a lot more traditional superhero stories could use. He does a nice job with the two versions of August Crimp – he doesn’t use a lot of detail in faces, so it’s all about the hair and the clothing, and Crimp has short, thin brown hair when he’s dressed as a man and a blonde, flowing wig when she dresses as a woman. He wears sensible and boring clothes when he’s August Crimp, but her women’s clothing are far fancier and stylish. It’s a clever way to show both how superheroes become more “alive” when they’re in costume (as their costumes are almost always flashier than their civilian clothes) and how Crimp himself becomes more herself when she’s dressing up. It’s not the most unique perspective ever, but because Appleby is constantly subverting our superhero expectations by switching the gender of his protagonist, it’s heightened and makes us think about it more. His style means that his superhero costumes look even odder than they would if done in a more traditional manner, which again heightens the weirdness of superheroes in the first place. The Fist is an interesting character, not only because of the way Appleby writes him but because of the way he draws him. I write “him” but we never see the Fist’s face or have any indication that he is indeed a “he,” and Appleby’s subtle commenting on this is what makes the Fist such an interesting character. He is aggressively unkind to Dragman, and there’s definitely a feeling of “protesting too much” when it comes to his anger about Dragman’s “perversion.” The Fist is violent and cruel, and because we never see his face, we can’t be certain if some sort of physical irregularity makes him lash out or if it’s something deep in his psyche. He wears a heart on his chest, which is ironic given the way he lives his life, but it’s also curious, because it implies a time when the Fist was, or at least wanted to be, something better. The Fist is the most obvious example of this odd dichotomy because we never see his face, but Appleby gives most of the superheroes an interesting “civilian” life so that the differences between those lives and their superhero lives is highlighted, and he does it with the men who dress like women at the club Dragman frequents as well. It’s a somewhat sad comment on the fact that these people need to hide who they are, and Appleby just takes the idea of “secret identities” from superheroes and applies it to cross-dressers. He does it well with the art, because when we meet some of the people in their “civilian” lives, Appleby has done such a good job drawing them as their “true” selves that they seem lessened because they can’t be everything they want to be. The art backs up the somewhat melancholy tone that the story establishes, despite the overall hopefulness of the book.

Dragman is a fascinating, complex look at what makes people keep secrets, why they shouldn’t have to, and what happens when those secrets come out and how people can move on from them. By placing August Crimp in a world of superheroes, Appleby makes it an adventure story and a mystery, which keeps it entertaining and allows him to slip in all sorts of interesting observations about human nature. He has a optimistic outlook on life, which is not a bad thing to have right about now, and while tragedy hits August Crimp and his friends, they lean on each other to get through it stronger. Crimp has to repair his marriage and family, but because he’s being honest with Mary, he can begin to do that. It’s a book about how we treat others that are different and asks why we do that, and suggests that perhaps there’s a better way. It is, in other words, very good. If you’re interested, you can always click the link below, and even if you’re not, you can use that link to shop and a little bit of it goes to us. So that’s nice.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆