Alan's War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope

AUTHOR: Guibert, Emmanuel

ARTIST: Emmanuel Guibert (illustrator); Céline Merrien (letterer)

PUBLISHER: L’Association (French), First Second (English)

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION:La Guerre d’Alan, 2000

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2000 (English translation, 2008)

Publication History

Alan’s War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope was originally published in France under the titles La Guerre d’Alan (2000), La Guerre d’Alan 2 (2002), and La Guerre d’Alan 3 (2008) by L’Association, an independent French comics publisher. L’Association started serializing the project in Lapin, its in-house magazine. The American English-language edition was published by First Second in 2008 and translated by Kathryn Pulver.

As he explains in his preface, Emmanuel Guibert met former American G.I. Alan Cope in 1994. Cope was a sixty-nine-year-old retired American living in France; Guibert, thirty, was a French illustrator and graphic novel writer. They agreed to form a partnership in which Cope would tell stories of his life and Guibert would illustrate them, starting a five-year collaboration that ended with Cope’s death in 1999. Their project would be a two-part biographical work. The first installment, Alan’s War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope, covers Cope’s life from his induction into the military to his death in France; the second, Alan’s Youth, was planned for later publication and would cover Cope’s early days in Pasadena, California, during the Great Depression.

Plot

Cope is working as a newspaper delivery boy in California when Pearl Harbor is bombed in 1941. Drafted into military service, he trains at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where he becomes part of a tank crew, is almost killed in a training accident, and learns radio operations. While war wages elsewhere, he teaches radio and discovers classical music in the G.I. recreation hall.

Cope lands in France in 1945 on his twentieth birthday. Although he does not see action, he receives a Purple Heart after falling out of a barn loft. He remembers destruction and chaos, including two months spent in a Normandy farmhouse because the Army misplaced the weapons and vehicles, speeding through villages in a tank and trying to clip the plaster off the buildings, destroying a farmer’s fence to build a fire, and even looting—he steals a watch, though he is not proud of it.

During General George S. Patton’s push to Plzen (Pilsen), Cope witnesses German soldiers being captured and shot by Russian officers. He meets a woman who was once a pianist and now washes clothes to survive. Alan’s War is full of such encounters; some are fleeting, as with the displaced Slavic Gypsies who share freshly cooked rabbit and a séance with him, or the nine-year-old German orphan whom he wants to adopt.

As a chaplain’s assistant in Bavaria at war’s end, Cope learns to ski and gets a private tour of Ludwig II’s castle and Richard Strauss’s house. He meets Gerhart Muench, a German composer and pianist, and his wife, Vera, an American poet. They had been part of a circle of writers, artists, and intellectuals living in Paris and Italy before the war who had subsequently been trapped in Europe once it began. Cope also meets Gisela, a pretty young woman who regrets that Nazism failed.

Following his demobilization, Cope decides to stay in Germany. After six months spent hiking and biking through the Austrian mountains, however, he returns home to his girlfriend Patzi, a life-changing decision he soon regrets. Cope starts training as a Baptist minister while working at a variety of jobs; he tutors spoiled rich children and takes Mexican migrant children out to the countryside. His college friends include the very wealthy, the thoughtful, and the lost. Some are religious, some atheist, and all work at figuring out their lives.

An emotional experience in the California redwood forest leads Cope to ask philosophical and religious questions. The natural world is more real to him than 1950’s California. He quits his ministry course, breaks off his engagement, and decides to return to Europe.

In the meantime, Gerhart and Vera contact him, having arrived in the United States penniless. With their artistic and literary connections, they expose Cope to the wealth of Hollywood, but he is unsettled by it, with his memories of wartime Europe still fresh.

The last part of the book recounts Cope’s life in France. Cope is vague about these years. He takes classes in pottery, starts a family, and becomes an army civilian employee. His government job gives him time to read, and this starts his next stage of life as a self-proclaimed philosopher, reviewing his life and trying to make sense of it and the choices he has made.

Cope died before Guibert finished their collaboration. Guibert inserts himself into the narrative to relate that Cope left the title of the book to him, and he aptly chose to call it Alan’s War.

Characters

•Alan Cope, the protagonist, recounts his memories of his experiences in World War II Europe and postwar California to illustrator Emmanuel Guibert.

•Emmanuel Guibert is not part of the story, but his presence is felt as he edits Cope’s words, illustrates Cope’s experiences and reminiscences, and appears in the final pages of the book after Cope’s death.

•Gerhart Muench is a German composer and pianist whom Cope knows in Europe and later in the United States. Drafted into the German army in World War II, he would not play piano for the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (German High Command). In California, he introduces Cope to a world of wealth and fame that contrasts sharply with the world Cope saw in war-torn Europe.

•Vera Muench is an American poet from Boston who stays in Germany with Gerhart, her husband, during the war. Cope loses contact with Vera and her husband, and finding them again plays an important part in his reflections on life.

•Patzi is Cope’s fiancé. They get engaged by mail during the war. He returns from Europe with the intention of marrying her, which he later considers to be one of his biggest mistakes. Although Cope and Patzi never marry, she becomes a symbol of the conventions that Cope finds constricting.

•Chaplain Captain Plimey Elliot was among the first Americans to arrive at a concentration camp near Munich. He offers Cope a job as chaplain’s assistant in postwar Austria, mainly because Cope can play the organ. His influence, in part, causes Cope to choose to enter the ministry upon his return to California.

Artistic Style

Guibert uses a distinctive ink-and-water technique for this black-and-white illustrated work. His images capture the uniqueness of individual faces, the darkness and confusion of the war, and the majesty of the California redwoods. The drawings are supplemented occasionally with reproductions of photographs, letters, documents, and even a musical score. Although Guibert’s drawing style ranges from abstract to near-photographic realism, it always remains recognizably the work of one individual, lending coherence to Cope’s story and melding the narrative with the images. The panels vary in size and are used to good effect, especially in giving a sense of place and of nature. Guibert includes a thirteen-page photo album at the end of the book, featuring snapshots of Cope and his friends, which gives further authority and authenticity to Guibert’s interpretation of Cope’s life in Alan’s War.

Guibert’s use of the first-person narrative for Cope’s story rings true and dominates the work. By using the first person and remaining true to his subject’s own words, Guibert captures an innocence of time and place, expressed by one person, which is refreshing in the larger context of the many interpretations of the war that are often defined by modern sensibilities and language. Word balloons are used effectively for the other characters. First Second Books made available on YouTube two brief companion clips, “Drawing with Water: Making the Art for Alan’s War” and “A Song for Alan, Performed by Emmanuel Guibert.” The latter, a song Cope taught Guibert, serves to make Cope as accessible through the Internet as Guibert’s illustrations make him in this graphic novel.

Themes

Like most good autobiographies and biographies, Alan’s War transcends just one person’s story. Although the surface theme is about war and its consequences, the dominant theme is more existential, as Cope’s reminiscences about the war and the decisions he makes in his life reflect his belief in the limits on individual choices imposed not only by war but also by tradition and religion, and the role these experiences play in human freedom and happiness.

Despite his openness about his life, Cope is ultimately a private person. The book hints at issues of spirituality and sexuality that may have placed him at odds with his surroundings, but his genuine love of music, the arts, and nature also separates him from a more superficial environment. A running theme throughout the book is the importance of nature and the arts. Reading and thinking are ways of figuring out life, and as Cope explains, he becomes a philosopher by doing so.

Another theme that emerges from his decision to reflect on his life is the importance of friends. Throughout his memoir, Cope searches for people he knew at various times of his life and discusses how they influenced him or how his life might have been different had he made different decisions concerning them. Also significant in this regard is Cope’s friendship with Guibert; their collaboration and the book it produced were a result of the decisions, thoughts, and friendship that are the themes of this work. Ultimately, Alan’s War is not about Cope’s brief time in the military during World War II, but about his battles with conformity, superficiality, and the social restraints that distance people from nature and limit free will.

Impact

Since its publication in France in 2000, Alan’s War has never been out of print. It has won numerous local and national awards and was nominated for four Eisner Awards in 2009, honors that suggest the impact of Alan’s War will long be felt in the world of graphic novels. In addition to the book’s notable artistic style, the collaboration between subject and author creates a distinctive model for the genre of biographical and autobiographical writing.

Guibert again employed the format of Alan’s War in his collaborative project with photojournalist Didier Lefèvre, The Photographer (2009). In this book, Guibert maintains his unique pen-and-water illustrations, this time both in color and in black and white, and adds them to the photographs that Lefèvre took in a Doctors Without Borders expedition to war-torn Afghanistan in 1986. Guibert’s work sets a standard for combined media in graphic novels; his mixture of photographs and art in The Photographer is praised by the Los Angeles Times for allowing “the graphic novel form to flex its muscle to stunning effect.”

Further Reading

Brown, Chester. Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography (2004).

Guibert, Emmanuel, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier. The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders (2009).

Kubert, Joe. Fax from Sarajevo (1996).

Neufeld, Josh. A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (2009).

Pekar, Harvey, and Gary Dumm. Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History (2008).

Satrapi, Marjane. The Complete Persepolis (2007).

Bibliography

Phegley, Keil. “Emmanuel’s Travels: Guibert Talks Alan’s War.” Comic Book Resources, May 8, 2009. http://comicbookresources.com?page=article&id=21146.

Watson, Sasha. “The Graphic Reality of a Stricken Land.” Los Angeles Times, May 31, 2009.