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“There is no secret identity.” - Joe Briggs reviews Punk Rock and Trailer Parks by Derf

(Andy’s note: So stoked with the standard of this piece. Looking for more contributors to write about comics. If you’re interested, do get in touch.)

There’s a really good article by Charles Baxter in which he coins the term ‘Owl Criticism’, referring to the sort of critics that dislike a book for its content, rather than the way it deals with its content, the sort of people who might say “This book has an owl in it, and I don’t like owls.”

I definitely get annoyed with reviews of art that don’t engage with the topic, and then refuse to analyse the reasons for this failure to engage, but it works the other way too. There are things we’re going to like because they’re in a certain genre we enjoy, or because they deal with a certain subject we’re interested in. That’s great. The problem there is, when we come to talk about them, we have to look at whether we love them for their merits, or just the topic they cover. Punk Rock and Trailer Parks is like that. It’s a book I love, but I do wonder if there was ever a chance I could dislike a book where Joe Strummer and Lester Bangs get drunk and decide to slash the tires of Journey’s tour bus.

Punk Rock and Trailer Parks is a bildungsroman set in and around the punk scene of late ’70s. It’s written and illustrated by John “Derf” Backderf, (whose website can be found here) also known for his weekly comic strip The City, and his short graphic memoir about the weird kid named Jeffrey Dahmer he was friends with at school. 

This is, for the most part, the story of Otto, a Tolkien-quotin’, beach-party-movie-lovin’, extremely tall, nerd, who, thanks to a couple of younger classmates, is drawn into the Ohio punk boom of the late ’70s that flowered in the wake of Devo and The Pretenders. Otto is, at heart, a traumatised victim of constant bullying, and has invented a ridiculous ‘cool’ persona for himself called ‘The Baron’ to take him away from himself. At school he’s still ridiculed, but as he gets drawn into the punk scene, finding himself as a bartender at the local punk club, The Bank, and eventually as a singer in a local band, he starts to take on this mantle for real. But as he becomes immersed in the punk scene, he’s still a nerd at school, and him and his friends have to negotiate creepy teachers, idiot jocks, unattainable crushes, sketchy neighbours, alcoholic uncles, and all the awkward travails of adolescence.

Like the songs of Craig Finn, another Midwestern chronicler of punk rock and youth, PR&TP is concerned with the pseudonymous power in punk rock; the same power that means a middle-class son of a diplomat can become ‘Joe Strummer’, living embodiment of the rhythm guitar; an angry DC white kid named Henry can borrow the name of a mysterious sax legend, and then pour the same amount of feeling that the old jazzman put into his horn into thrashing hardcore anthems of alienation; a fat kid can store up the names he’s been called and choose to wear it as a proud definition, striding onto the stage, axe in hand, as Pig Champion; and in this story, a bullied masturbation-obsessed high-school band-geek can take on the hard-rocking super-tough alter ego of THE BARON and become king of the scene. This is the key theme of the book for me, teenage reinvention of self and how far it can take you, what it’s limitations are, and how it both liberates and traps you. Maybe the central message is actually a wholeheartedly corny ‘be yourself’ but it blurs the idea of what that self is, because it’s neither the superstar or the geek. There is no secret identity. It’s about establishing a sustainable synthesis between these two conflicting parts of yourself.

The journey of Otto is chronicled in a Forrest Gump style trip through the scene of the time; meeting Wendy O. Williams, hanging out on the The Ramones tour bus, shooting the shit with Stiv Bators. There’s one panel where two of his friends fail to realise that his car isn’t finished and almost fall through the floor of it, later on, to show how far he’s come, that panel is repeated but this time with Strummer and Bangs in the car on the aforementioned mission to stop the corporate rock and roll machine in its tracks.

The art has a blocky cartoony style to it that emphasises the adolescent awkwardness of the leads, and probably owes something to the exaggerated physical attributes of Robert Crumb’s work (although less interested in tits, though this is a book which has three teenage boys as the main characters, so inevitably that obsession crops up). I really like the way it deliberately distorts perspective to highlight the juxtaposition of certain people or objects and their relation to each other. It’s one of those places where you can point at comics and say, “Look, this is not just a film storyboard. This is something you cannot do as subtly or effectively in any other medium.” And I like books where you can do that, because if you can’t do that, then what was the point of making it a comic? There are also cool touches like the Ramones’ amps bouncing merrily in the air like the anthropomorphic NPCs in 3D platform games, and I love the way the lettering is drawn as an integral part of the art style, taking up large portions of the page when it’s shouted by one of the punk bands we see in action.

One minor criticism is that sometimes it falls foul of the show-don’t-tell rule, with regards to both the symbolism and themes, and just basic images. Some of the things people say are overly articulate. It works alright most of the time with The Baron as that’s his character, an eloquent commenter on all the craziness he’s caught up in, but it’s a technique that’s overused. Some things that happen are obvious enough that they don’t need to be expounded upon by the characters. The first time we see The Bank, we don’t need one of the characters to announce “An abandoned bank turned into a punk club!” We can see that. Not just simple descriptions either, sometimes the motivations of the characters and the symbolic moments should be left for the reader to work out for themselves. Steve Aylett said of his slipstream science-fiction Accomplice quartet: “Unlike real life, most Accomplicers are aware of and ridiculously articulate about their own delusions, but like real life, they don’t change.” Except Aylett used it deliberately to great comic effect. In Derf’s writing it sometimes comes across like a lack of faith in his own narrative ability, which he shouldn’t have, as it’s a great story he’s telling, and he tells it well for the vast majority of the book. It’s just that sometimes we don’t need to be told what’s inside someone’s head, or what we can see happening right on the page.

The end of the book does conform to the narrative of a lot of punk rock stories with a moral that suggests this is all just a phase. To risk Owl Criticism, I’m not a fan of that do to my own personal preference for seeing punk rock as a living breathing malleable entity, but I recognise that it really works with the story here. And it’s not a depressing ending, it perfectly captures the wry mixture of knowing melancholia and stomping triumph present in these life-altering moments in the same way as The Clash’s Death or Glory. There’s a sense that something has gone, but that something just as cool is about to creep over the horizon. This sense of loss is only amplified by the post-story final page which notes that pretty much every single one of the punk rock icons of the time featured in the book are sadly no longer with us. This book is a hymn to the transformative powers of punk rock, and a story of all the weirdos and outsiders finding a place for themselves, not just for the glorious moment when the music rushes through their veins, but how they have to fight to keep that feeling alive in the everyday grind of society.

(Punk Rock and Trailer Parks is published by SLG Publishing, formerly Slave Labor Graphics.)

Joe Briggs is a writer from Oxford. He owns too many books and yet not enough. He attempts to map the shape of his punk-addled brain on his blog. He also has a twitter, a tumblr and a barely know ‘er. Like every other cunt in the world, he’s writing a novel. (Photo by Marc Gaertner)