Petrograd by Philip Gelatt and Tyler Crook
Petrograd may be the best book I have read this year. I understand that January is not even over, but this year will have a hard time putting anything else in front of me this good. Indeed, if I read this in 2011 I would say that, though the Whitehead and Ferguson edited volume War in the Tribal Zone was pretty damn good, as was Cultural Materialism by Marvin Harris and Reclaiming A Scientific Anthropology by Lawrence Kuznar. None of those book were written or released in 2011, and none of them were graphic novels. The best graphic novel I read last year wasn’t even from last year, Jodorowsky and Moebius The Incal collected editions. Number 2 for 2011 was probably Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1969. Any year that Alan Moore makes comics is a special year these days.
What makes this book immediately stand beside such indie masterpieces as Skyscrapers of the Midwest and Funhome is the masterful engagement of an interesting subject with a stylized look and a great delivery. Petrograd is set in 1916 Petrograd and concerned with the plot to assassinate Rasputin. It is historical fiction divorced from tropes of the autobiographical that you find in many indie graphic novels. It is also not a historically driven piece such as one would find with Pekar’s work. It is an intrigue tale set in the visually rich world of winter in a Russian city on the eve of a singular revolution.
The narrative follows the actions and reactions of a British intelligence officer named Cleary, who is charged with the mission of making sure that the Russians do not make peace with the Germans, thereby removing an important front of Allied support during World War I. To this end he gets pushed into a situation where he must carry out a plot to kill Rasputin, though he has no desire to do so and is pressured into it only to be abandoned by his field office. He also makes friendly relations with a member of a revolutionary communist underground, who becomes not only his lover but the source of his salvation when the Russian government wants him arrested (so they can kill him) and the British government that wants to return him to the German front since he has been classified a rogue agent. The rock and a hard place situation keeps the intensity up, and the character makes a sympathetic hero who is just trying to survive in a situation of politics and war that has decided that he, by name, needs to take the blame for the sins that espionage commits as the matters of its practice.
Crook’s art is great. Clean black and white panels with a bit of roughness. The drawing belie a relative simplicity that propels the reading of the panels and the movement to the next page but are quite beautifully textured pieces. The black and white rendering of the art is aided by a sepia shading that adds to the readers lens of age on the events as well as establishing a historical framing for the context of pre-revolutionary Russia. Visually all these factors build up to a striking underpinning for the text that makes this an above expectation package of text and art. A winner on all counts and a perfect book…at least I had no complaints.
