Moral ambiguity, stellar artwork in 'On the Ropes'

A Novel

By James Vance

and Dan E. Burr

W.W. Norton. 247 pp. $24.95

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Reviewed by Dan DeLuca

James Vance and Dan E. Burr's

On the Ropes

picks up the story of Freddie Bloch, the 12-year-old drifter at the height of the Depression introduced in the authors' highly regarded

Kings in Disguise

(1988).

Ranked by the Guardian among the top 10 graphic novels of all time, Kings in Disguise has drawn praise from such heavy hitters of the genre as Art Spiegelman and Alan Moore.

As On the Ropes begins in 1937, Freddie is a carny barker in a Works Progress Administration traveling circus. The job includes assisting Gordon Corey, an escape artist with dark secrets whose big stunt is to avoid death-by-hanging every night.

That's to the great relief of the 10 cents-a-ticket audience he works to a lather in a pre-escape soliloquy about how down-and-out Americans are "all scared these days, on the ropes like a nation of punch-drunk fighters."

That script was written by fresh-faced Freddie, now known as Fred, a budding novelist secretly working as a union operative who's familiar with class warfare from when got caught up in bloody labor riots in Detroit while searching for the father who abandoned him in Kings in Disguise.

On the Ropes - whose story Vance first told in a successful stage play in the early 1980s before teaming with artist Burr to create Kings in Disguise, which was actually an On the Ropes prequel (if that's not too confusing) - is subtitled "A Novel."

That's to advise you of the book's serious intent - or maybe it's just to point out the silliness of the graphic-novel label, used as it is to categorize hand-drawn picture books whether they are wholly made up or works of nonfiction.

But however you categorize it, On the Ropes is a stunning book whose characters are drawn in black-and-white but who inhabit morally ambiguous gray areas that give Vance's story multidimensional depth.

In the preface he wrote to Kings in Disguise when it was reissued in 2006, Vance called the On the Ropes play "a bizarre pastiche of Depression-era leftist melodrama . . . filled with more onstage violence than any two Jacobean tragedies."

Reduced to a basic plot outline that involves two sinister antiunion killers hot on young Bloch's trail, and a hand-to-hand-combat denouement staged on the carnival gallows, that description loosely fits.

But On the Ropes plays out on a human scale, skillfully shifting narrative perspective (usually indicated by a change in drawing styles). It creates empathetic characters among both the good and bad guys - the death-defying, inherently decent Corey is an alcoholic on the run from his past, which is entwined with that of the evil-seeming thug hunting for Fred, who has complicated demons of his own. Fred deals with the moral quandaries confronting him as best he can, sometimes knowingly putting the people around him at risk as he seeks a greater good.

On the Ropes is a steely-eyed book. Freddie doesn't make the cause of the working man his own out of any theoretical ideal. He gets involved out of pragmatism and common decency, and then is forced to live with his choices.

And while it's a smartly written, swiftly moving tale that empathizes deeply with the labor movement while largely avoiding turning union organizers into white-hatted heroes, what really makes the pages come alive is Burr's arresting visual style.

His simple drawings expertly convey complex emotions as well as confusion and diffidence, as Freddy tries to balance typical 17-year-old concerns, like why he feels self-conscious going out for a soda with the prettiest girl at the circus, with the perils of delivering secret missives that will affect thousands of lives.

The novelistic detail is there in Vance's compelling story, but what really makes On the Ropes hit home is Burr's stellar artwork.