Some time ago, discussing Lord knows what comic (quite possibly Moebius’ Arzach), my friend and fellow critic Tom Shapira, paraphrasing Harvey Pekar, quipped: “Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures. But take words out of the equation and you can only do half as much.” Silent comics have long been a preoccupation of mine, mostly because they are a school of comics dominated by almosts: undoubtedly in part because of the aforementioned Arzach, the idea of the silent comic is all too often¹ imbued with a pretense of spiritual asceticism that feels powerful but is, in truth, rather dull; the conceit of silence is reduced to gimmickry, trapping the creators to such an extent that they spend substantial space and time trying to work around themselves.

I thought about this while reading The Breath and the Dream, the first in a planned series of translations of the Italian Ken Parker series of western comics by writer Giancarlo Berardi and artist Ivo Milazzo, published by Epicenter Comics in June of this year. Epicenter has made the noteworthy decision to release The Breath and the Dream as a prelude to the proper Ken Parker ‘saga’ even though its five constituent stories were released a decade into the original Italian run, but the comics themselves feel entirely unburdened of any context or lore (it helps, of course, that the comics are largely wordless, and preexisting context is hard enough to convey nonverbally that the authors just don’t try).

It’s worth discussing Berardi and Milazzo’s overall opus within the context of European Western comics. The European Western is, generally speaking, an odd beast, often electing to reduce the politics and mythography of 19^th century America to a set of ciphers, a vocabulary recognizable enough that any historical inaccuracy is forgivable in the name of the aesthetic (Lucky Luke is perhaps the most extreme example of a European Western that has completely and utterly relinquished any correspondence between map and territory). 

The Ken Parker comics, by contrast, do desire, for the most part, some semblance of specificity: their protagonist is no mysterious, extra-temporal man-with-no-name but a character with a fairly particular biography. He ages over the course of his narratives, and partakes in concrete, chronologically-anchored events: other volumes in the series portray him, among other things, as a strike-breaking Pinkerton; “Pale Shadows” (1987), the fourth story in the volume presently under discussion, flashes back to our protagonist taking part in the forced displacement of Native Americans.

This invocation of ethnic cleansing, however, is an outlier within The Breath and the Dream, which more often than not elects to break away from history – and, indeed, from civilization at large: though other people do on occasion appear in its four stories, the collection is a man-versus-nature narrative if there ever was one, focusing on Ken’s survival over the four seasons. I am reminded, as is frequently the case, of an anecdote included in Ling Ma’s novel Severance: “Upon seeing Utah for the first time, Tarkovsky remarked that now he knew Americans were vulgar because they filmed westerns in a place that should only serve as backdrop to films about God.”² Berardi and Milazzo, here, seem acutely aware of this divide and try to bridge it, with their cowboy almost taking on the role of the stoic monk of a new wilderness-religion.

Yet what enables the protagonist’s quasi-apotheotic journey is not his own actions but his reactions to the pattern that asserts itself around him. In “The Pups” (1984)³, Ken shoots at a deer that had evaded a confrontation with a tiger and three cubs; the deer survives, and Ken chases it down, initially planning to kill it but having second thoughts after seeing its fawns, instead electing to tend to the mother-deer’s wounds. The family of deer that Ken grows so attached to is ultimately killed by a Native, and, though the cowboy is initially furious, he loses his will to fight as he sees the Native man’s family: the killing, here, is an act of necessity, of familial care no less worthy than the bond between the deer and its fawn (surely he is cognizant, too, of the fact that he himself had tried to kill the deer just a few pages prior, but Berardi and Milazzo make a point of repeating the image of parental responsibility). In “Soleado” (1985), the stranded protagonist finds a band of horses and manages to trap a mare; he tends to the mare until she gives birth, only then the horse he had initially tried to capture, a black stallion, returns, and the mare and foal run off with him, leaving the cowboy as horseless as he started out. In the aforementioned “Pale Shadows,” the hungry Ken comes close to shooting an aging buffalo, but his water-clogged gun proves useless. In the three-page coda “The Funny End” (1985, originally titled “Quack: An Homage to Donald Duck”), Ken tries to shoot at a lakeside duck only for his gun to backfire cartoonishly. (Though the way Milazzo renders this—first as the duck looks back at Ken and ‘changes’ into Donald Duck in cowboy garb, then as the gun backfires and Ken becomes the cartoon character—makes the story a case where stylistic charm, not substance, is the point.)

Time and time again, Berardi and Milazzo find new routes to arrive at the same terminus: failure. This is not the sort of cowboy who warps the whole town around his arrival and rides off; he doesn’t have a horse to ride off on, and the world has other plans, other workings, independent of him. It’s a simple divergence from convention, but one that the creators want you to pay close attention to: things don’t always work out.

Only this divergence is no real divergence at all, in light of of how Ken responds to each of these situations: he resigns himself to the killing of the deer he had so conscientiously tended to, and to the escape of the family of horses; when his water-clogged gun fails, he only laughs and straddles his horse, saying an amicable goodbye to the buffalo. It is not that he merely takes his failures in stride; his reactions are a state of nigh-nirvana. Whether he succeeds or fails means nothing to him, to the point that the reader may easily forget that the starting point of most of these stories is one of sheer physical hunger.

Even the one deviation from this otherwise-categorical pattern of failure, “The Moon of Magnolias in Bloom” (1985), only serves to enforce this idea of Ken as a manifestation of unwavering peace: Ken falls in with a young Native couple, and there is some budding sexual attraction between the woman and himself; he intends to pursue it, but his intentions are of course frustrated by the other man, who is depicted as boastful and coarse compared to Ken’s own charmingly-laconic personality. None of this, of course, stops Ken from rising to the occasion when tragedy strikes – when a tiger kills the Natives’ horse, the man explains to Ken that the two were supposed to be married on their return to their tribe, at which point Ken readily offers his own horse, placing the needs of the other far before his own needs or wants, even placing himself in a disadvantage in the process. Where the brunt of the Ken Parker series sought to comment on its genre by incorporating traditionally-unusual themes, The Breath and the Dream stands out in its distillation of its protagonist into both an archetypal 18^th-century-Romantic hero and a personification of idealized, ‘positive’ masculinity: he is rugged, powerful, stoic – but, at the same time, he is empathetic and sympathetic alike, connected to everything around him to the point of occasional ego-death. The left hand of judgment holds the pistol and hits its mark, but the right hand of mercy heals and gives with great generosity. 

In this regard, I should state, the wordless conceit works to the creators’ favor from a mechanical standpoint, at least in theory: being on his lonesome for most of the book, there should be no real need for verbal language; if anything, Ken speaking to the reader under the guise of speaking to himself (be it out loud or in internal monologue) would both bog down the otherwise-lean story and undercut the protagonist’s classical not-a-word-wasted masculinity. But I did say “at least in theory,” and theory is worthless: the idea that words are “unnecessary” (per the back-cover promotional copy) only really withstands scrutiny if you accept that the hand-lettered onomatopoeia that proliferate the book—be it the bang of a rifle, the grawr of a tiger, or what have you—are not, in fact, words; even then, there is the matter of the Native man in “The Moon of Magnolias in Bloom” (1985), whose boasts of felled animals are conveyed in pictogram.

Milazzo’s artwork likewise has a perfect aesthetic appeal to it: his application of watercolor has a soft, tentative touch, far from the particularity and precision of, say, François Boucq; his pen-strokes find the right balance between ‘precise’ and ‘loose,’ between classical solidity and brashness, that is perfectly orthodox without falling into staid regurgitation. (He’s no Doug Wildey, of course, but few artists are.) And yet beauty, as we know, is not the be-all-end-all of this communicational endeavor of cartooning, at least insofar as sometimes it is reached through negation, or the lack of aesthetic appeal; there must be some metaphorical negative space, some friction, to make beauty pop. Milazzo, however, is too caught up in the idealized aesthetic allure of his own imagined natural world, shying away from moments of grime: when the horse is attacked in “The Moon of Magnolias in Bloom,” Milazzo zooms out for the moment of impact, placing more distance between himself and his subject than previously; the aftermath of the scene, when both the horse and the tiger lay slain (the latter killed, of course, by our eponymous cowboy), is perhaps the loosest drawing in the whole book, presumably so the artist may gesture at the drama without having to depict the brunt of its weight. 

Here, then, The Breath and the Dream marries the key difficulties of both silent comics and European Westerns: the longing for a Grand Statement, coupled with the reluctance to let go of one’s own conceits of remove. The four stories in the volume (“The Funny End” notwithstanding) falter under the load of their own signifiers: they are perfectly appealing, even enjoyable, but only because they are too caught in their own romance. In this regard, the appearances of Native Americans in “The Moon of Magnolias in Bloom” and “Pale Shadows” are most telling: in the former, Ken proves himself more noble than the Native man first by playing the humble straight man to the Native’s boasts of hunting and killing, then by overlooking their bouts of friction and offering his own horse; in the latter, Ken’s participation in the Trail of Tears is offered as a simple ‘by the way,’ a memory not to be dwelled on for too long – sure, he may be sad about it, but he’s also sad about the memory of a train full of strangers shooting down grazing buffalo, and, anyway, it is his hunger, not his sadness, that we’ve gathered here to talk about. There is no intent of political interrogation, of course, certainly not if it might take away from our hero’s valor.

Berardi and Milazzo thus end up suspending themselves between unwavering solidity—of their artwork, of their narrative—and an aversion to particulars, two elements that fundamentally do not mix. Especially with Milazzo’s painted artwork being so even-handed and solid, there is no room for the operatic tonality of, say, the proto-comic woodcut novels of Lynd Ward and Franz Masereel (or Laurence Hyde for that matter, though he came later), whose narratives fully embraced the partial nature of wordlessness, yet there is no even-handed critique, either, only a withdrawal from one’s own world into that ultimate destination of romance: non-existence.

The narrative conceit of Ken Parker: The Breath and the Dream—being four stories to represent the four seasons and their field conditions—was inspired by Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, but the comparison scarcely works to the Italian comic’s favor: both the geographical and the philosophical-political terrains of Hemingway are anchored in a specificity that Berardi and Milazzo seem reluctant to embrace, so patently unable are they to decide whether they want to exist in reality or a dream thereof. Perhaps words are, as the back cover puts it, unnecessary – but that’s only because the authors seem afraid of saying the wrong thing.

1. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, though most exceptions I can think of fall into the realm of humor comics: Jim Woodring’s Frank, Roger Langridge’s Fred the Clown, Antonio Prohias’ Spy vs. Spy, and Tiger Tateishi’s Cheat Sheets all work precisely because they borrow from slapstick traditions, prioritizing motion over message and thus turning the motion into the message.
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2. I cite Ling Ma specifically because I have not, in the years since I read it, been able to verify whether or not this was a true story or just something the author came up with as a charming, fitting throwaway. Apt, in a way: in Severance‘s Tarkovsky as in the European Western, the truth of myth transcends the truth of facts. ↩︎
3. Alternately titled “The Cubs” in the translated introduction by Marko Sunjic which originally appeared in the Croatian edition of this volume, an inconsistency that is rather glaring given that the cover to the story appears on the opposite side of the same spread. ↩︎