Review time! with ‘Harlem’

“Take my advice, it’s either live or die, you’ve got to be strong if you wanna survive”

Harlem is the third of Mikaël’s “Depression triptych” (don’t blame me, it’s on the back of this book!) from NBM, and while I own the other two, I haven’t actually read them yet. I figured I’d better get to one of them! If you’ve been paying attention to my posts (and why wouldn’t you – it’s not like there’s anything more important to do!), you’ll recall that this is the second book about Stephanie St. Clair that I’ve read in as many years. I’m fascinated by stuff that gets into the zeitgeist like this – was there a documentary about “Queenie” that enough people saw that it spurred interest in her by disparate comics creators? Beats me. It happens sometimes – how did we get two “terrorists take over the White House” movies within a few months of each other?!?!?

Harlem is a beautiful book, as I knew it would be – Mikaël’s art is very “European,” in that he uses a fairly thin line, tends to make his characters either long and lithe or stockier than normal, his brush work is exquisite, and his watercolors are gorgeous. His work resembles Mark Buckingham’s, to my mind (or perhaps Buckingham’s resembles his?), and as Buckingham is a good artist, I hope that’s a compliment! This book is set during the Depression, of course, and mostly during the winter, so Mikaël uses a lot of drab colors, but the book is not dark at all, but oddly vibrant even with the sepia tones. There are few reasons for the color choices – of course, the wintry early 1930s were not a great time in Harlem or anywhere else in the country, so the colors reflect that, but also, when we see flashbacks to St. Clair’s early life, Mikaël colors them in complementary blues and yellows, making them stand out wonderfully from the rest of the book. It’s a nice choice by the artist. He gives us a bunch of fascinating characters, too, from St. Clair herself to Robert Bishop, the reporter who “betrays” her (not intentionally, but still) to Bumpy (her right-hand man) and Tillie, her best friend, and Dutch Schultz, who’s moving in on her territory. He does a superb job giving them all individual personalities, and we get a lot from the way they move through the book about how they fit into this society. St. Clair has risen from destitution in Martinique to the top of the heap (literally and figuratively, as she lives in an apartment on Sugar Hill), and Mikaël does a wonderful job showing how she has adopted an aristocratic mien even as she still makes sure to take care of her friends and her people. He does marvelous work with fashion, too – the men wear the standard suits of the day, naturally, but St. Clair and other women are usually dressed to the nines, and it’s interesting to see how Mikaël shows that even during the Depression, people tried to look nice. This is a staple of fiction set during the olden days, of course, as society didn’t want to be reminded of those it had failed, and Mikaël does a good job with that while still showing the effects of the collapsing economy. He does an excellent job showing both the beauty of Jazz Age Harlem and the decay within it. He also uses chunky blacks to good effect, shadowing the faces of some of the villains of the piece – Schultz and the corrupt cops – in some panels, either implying or outright stating that they’re doing nefarious things. It’s a bit of a cliché, but that’s because it usually works, and it does here. In the flashbacks, he does a wonderful job dropping holding lines a bit more and using more silhouettes, making the memories a bit more abstract, contrasting them even more with the present day. Mikaël immerses us nicely in Harlem of 1931, and the book is extremely beautiful to look at.

Mikaël’s story is perfectly fine, although it’s the slightest bit perfunctory. St. Clair ran a numbers racket in Harlem, and she used a lot of her wealth to make Harlem a better place to live. She resisted corrupt cops and the white gangsters from downtown who realized there was money to be made in Harlem and tried to horn in on her territory. Mikaël gives us Bishop, a white reporter who is a bit too enthusiastic about black culture but who edits St. Clair’s articles denouncing the racism of the city’s power elite and therefore comes to know St. Clair a little bit. Mikaël does a decent job with the narrative, to be sure, and he shows us that St. Clair never forgot her roots and her friends, and when she’s not being “Queenie,” the book has more verve than when she’s being the Gangster Queen of Harlem, but there’s not enough of it. When Bishop “betrays” her (I won’t get into how he does), it’s a compelling moment, but not quite as hard-hitting because he’s spent a bit too much time with the Gangster Queen and not enough time with Stephanie St. Clair. It’s a bit frustrating, but not enough to make the book not work. It’s clear that St. Clair needed to be who she was to survive, and Mikaël does a pretty good job showing that, but it feels like the dramatic turn that breaks her world a bit comes too quickly, without enough set-up. (I should point out, though, that there are a few moments in the book where he shows that things aren’t always as they seem, and it adds a nice touch of ironic realism to the story.) The book ends with Dutch Schultz’s death in 1935 (which St. Clair had nothing to do with), which both fits the story Mikaël had set up and leaves out quite a bit of St. Clair’s evolution – she didn’t die, after all, until 1969, and her “second act” was pretty interesting, as well. But I get it: she “triumphs” over her adversary and returns to Harlem, ready to fight the good fight again. It’s not a bad place to end, even if it feels a bit unsatisfying. This isn’t a straight biography of Stephanie St. Clair, after all, it’s a comic about a specific place and time, and St. Clair just happened to be the dominant personality at that time and place. Mikaël does a good job capturing the feel of Harlem in the early 1930s, and that’s what’s important.

I don’t love Harlem, but it’s still a good comic. I am, of course, going to read the other two comics in his “triptych,” and having read this, I’m looking forward to them a bit more!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆