Flood! A Novel in Pictures

AUTHOR: Drooker, Eric

ARTIST: Eric Drooker (illustrator)

PUBLISHERS: Four Walls Eight Windows; Dark Horse Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1986; 1990

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1992

Publication History

Flood! A Novel in Pictures was first published in book form by Four Walls Eight Windows in 1992. Chapter 1 (“Home”) and chapter 2 (“L”) had appeared in limited self-published editions in 1986 and 1990, respectively. The book was subsequently reprinted by Dark Horse Comics in 2002 and again in 2007. The 2007 edition includes an introduction by author and book reviewer Luc Sante, an interview with author Eric Drooker by comics creator Chris Lanier, and a “Sketchbook,” featuring “Preliminary Drawings, Thumbnail Sketches, and Rough Ideas.”

Plot

Flood! A Novel in Pictures is divided into three sections: “Home,” “L,” and “Flood.” In each, readers follow a nameless male character’s travels through New York City. “Home” follows events of the character’s life over the course of two days. At first, readers observe his path to his job at a factory, only to discover the factory has been shut down. Thus begins the first of several journeys. After passing by common sights such as a storefront full of television screens, street peddlers, and pizza restaurants, the character goes to a bar, where he meets a woman, whom he seduces. He learns she is a junkie prostitute with an angry pimp, who beats him and throws him out on the street. The character continually encounters and escapes from difficulties and threats, such as poverty and eviction. After picking someone’s pocket, he ends up in jail but is subsequently released. At the end of “Home,” the character fades into nothingness, dissolving, literally and psychologically, into a stick figure.

In “L,” the man goes underground and falls asleep on the subway, a mode of transportation that, for Drooker, symbolizes “the unconscious state of the masses.” In the man’s dream, the tunnels are transformed into mystical caves inhabited by mysterious, fantastic, subterranean, subaquatic, and fearsome but ecstatic beings. Rather than going across town or to Brooklyn, the character, before being awakened by a police officer with a vicious dog, is taken somewhere new. In this place, historical art is depicted, including archetypal cave paintings and the Roman goddess Venus. The character encounters tribes of people and animals for whom tribal consciousness is vital. Locating his own underground tribe, he receives a drum and an invitation to join in. The character finds an intensely stimulating, Edenic landscape and community before being exiled to the street again.

In “Flood,” the character emerges from the subway to find rain pouring on everything, including his dilapidated studio. With a cat on his shoulder, he draws nonetheless. “Flood” alternates between the artist’s drawing and the scene in which he is drawing. A sequence of passages appears, containing a continuous verbal message; an Eskimo hunter sings a hopeful song that includes the lines: “There is nothing but ice around me, that is good! / Aya, I am joyful, that is good! / My country is nothing but slush . . . that is good!” More tribalism is reflected, as water begins to accumulate on the studio floor. The artist draws a man with an umbrella walking through sheets of rain, and then he becomes that man. He goes out, is carried away through the storm by a gust of wind that snares his umbrella, sees the city through clouds, and lands on a Coney Island roller coaster.

The character roams amid the amusement park’s freak shows. A cultural history is depicted, initiated by a tattoo appearing on a performer’s arm. Christopher Columbus, Indian genocide, slave ships, and battleships are recalled. Disillusioned by seeing his body distorted by funhouse mirrors, the character emerges from a building, regaining his human features to begin the book’s final journey.

Returning to the city, he encounters a forceful woman who leads an uprising. She is brutalized by police, and a riot ensues. Scenes of passionate fighting, including one depicting slingshots fighting against tanks, continue until the flood overtakes everything. The artist returns home and continues to draw while underwater. Then he and his cat float away on the umbrella. He is overcome by a wave; the cat boards a ship containing pairs of other animals and a Noah figure, who float away from circling sharks, leaving tops of skyscrapers behind.

Characters

•An unnamed man is a contemporary, imaginary Everyman and serves as the central figure and dramatic focus throughout Flood! A Novel in Pictures. This character’s appearance changes between the first and second section, as if the stories are portraying any individual for whom urban circumstances are challenging and solitary. In “Home” and “L,” the character is rendered as outgoing, if downtrodden; the artist who is portrayed in “Flood” is much more energetic.

•An unnamed woman, highlighted for several pages in “Home,” forms a brief relationship with the male character. She is a prostitute, whose pimp also appears.

•Police or soldiers are presented as antagonists in each section of the book.

•A man and woman, amid the many beings the character encounters in “L,” they are the only ones to emerge from the crowd. They are shown coupling in a jungle.

•An Eskimo hunter, featured in “Flood,” sings and is rescued by tribesmen.

•A second unnamed woman appears and dominates the segment depicting the uprising and riot. This particular character became a prototype for Drooker: She also appears in his Blood Song: A Silent Ballad (2002).

•Cat, predominantly featured in “Flood,” is the main character’s steady companion and ultimately emerges as the flood’s sole survivor.

•Noah-like character is introduced at the end of the narrative. He is clearly modeled after popular depictions of the biblical character, wearing a tunic and sporting a long white beard.

Artistic Style

Using scratchboard technique, Drooker’s art mirrors woodcut designs. His powerful, stark imagery suggests the graphics and aesthetics of woodcut artists Lynd Ward and Frans Masereel, whom Drooker acknowledges as influences in his interview with Lanier. In the first two sections, his drawings appear to be black on white; in “Flood,” many are white on black.

Words appear in one section, enabling Drooker to situate Flood! A Novel in Pictures as a primitive, tribal celebration. Discussing the absence of language in his novels, Drooker explains that dozens of languages were spoken in the Lower East Side, the New York City neighborhood in which he grew up. “My wordless approach is an attempt at communication,” he states. “Pictures are a means of communicating with people when words feel inadequate.”

Drooker subtly yet powerfully captures how many events are always simultaneously occurring in the urban environment. As the character walks through city streets, something else is happening; these concurrences are transmitted poetically throughout the book. To be urban is to be nonsingular, which has its consequences, particularly in difficult or desperate times.

In the sequence following the character’s encounter with the pimp, the number of panels appearing per page multiplies, at first numbering sixteen and then sixty-four. Some of the minuscule panels are indecipherable; others are roughly intimate, passing through urban scenarios. Drooker explains these segments as “a reflection of a feeling of claustrophobia,” symbolizing an individual’s smallness in relation to the overall human scale of the city and abstraction within its experience. In the final scene of “Home,” the character becomes a small blue blur on a page containing 256 panels. Use of the color blue is then pervasive in “Flood,” strategically animating the presence of water, energy, and emotion.

Themes

Flood! A Novel in Pictures portrays a character’s tumultuous confrontations with and escape from authority in a decaying New York City. “Personal experience was my starting point,” states Drooker; living in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, he regularly witnessed cultural encounters. Turmoil and subcultures are effectively rendered. Television and commercial iconography are frequently present, as he recognizes their impact on landscape and culture. New York City is unmistakable as the visual setting. Iconic structures as well as street-level symbols, such as Keith Haring graffiti and the logo of the band Missing Foundation, predominate. These figures are often rudimentarily accompanied by international commercial iconography, such as the golden arches of fast food giant McDonald’s. Through these cultural indicators, Drooker conveys multiple stories at once.

Pages at the beginning and end feature sheet music, credited as “traditional,” with new lyrics by Drooker. The second verse begins, “Lord gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water but fire next time!” Drooker rewrites lyrics of a hymn to fit his context. A poetic transformation occurs in this artistic gesture: The deluge becomes purposeful—keeping the fire of biblical prophecy from consuming Earth. As Sante suggests in the introduction, the flood may be part of a cycle of larger events, possibly with particular religious connotations, but it is also rooted in science. By the 1990’s, Drooker would have heard speculation regarding the effect of global warming on sea levels, which would have strongly propelled his imagination.

Flood! A Novel in Pictures is passionate, visionary, dystopic, and relevant. There is a prevailing sense that greed and commerce wear everything down. Sexual scenarios, indicative of human needs or desires, are present, but this motif is only one of many subtexts. In the dream sequence of “L,” Drooker imagines and projects visions of humanity within calamitous times. One of the clouds floating above the multitudinous, monolithic city buildings at the opening of “Flood” takes shape as a fish, suggesting the deluge to come has animated, organic, mythic properties.

Impact

While comics creator Art Spiegelman’s Maus received the Pulitzer Prize Special Award the same year that Flood! A Novel in Pictures was published, the graphic novel genre had not yet blossomed. Drooker’s book is among those that helped advance the wordless novels genre. Recalling the demands of the graphic novel while reviewing Drooker’s “hefty” work, Spiegelman writes, “Each drawing in the sequence must work not only as a self-contained composition but also as a kind of hieroglyphic picture-writing.” Drooker presents tangible examples of how this is accomplished; as Spiegelman writes, he has “discovered the magic of pulling light and life out of an inky sea of darkness.” The images presented by Drooker not only garnered critical acclaim, but also the book’s historical significance was recognized when the Library of Congress acquired the original artwork for its prints and photographs division. Further, since the appearance of Flood! A Novel in Pictures, Drooker’s images have been featured many times on the cover of The New Yorker literary magazine.

Further Reading

Drooker, Eric. Blood Song: A Silent Ballad (2002).

Drooker, Eric, and Allen Ginsberg. Illuminated Poems (1996).

Masereel, Frans. Passionate Journey: A Vision in Woodcuts (2007).

Ward, Lynd. Six Novels in Woodcuts (2010).

Bibliography

Drooker, Eric. Street Posters and Ballads: A Selection of Poems, Songs, and Graphics. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998.

Speigelman, Art. “Gloomy Toons.” Review of Flood! A Novel in Pictures by Eric Drooker. The New York Times Book Review, December 27, 1992.

Varnum, Robin, and Christina T. Gibbons. The Language of Comics: Word and Image. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.