Here's a graphic novel that probably needs some background to fully appreciate. It's independent in nature, published by Top Shelf Productions in 2002 long before they were bought by IDW and it's very loose in approach. While there is a vaguely sequential story, it's fragmented into an unusual order that doesn't always seem to make sense, because it's much more about setting a mood and capturing a time than of telling a specific story.

So, while it's about Jimmy Watts, who gets a saxophone for Christmas at seven and grows up into a jazz musician who starts a band called Bughouse, it's really about a much bigger picture with a single musician like Jimmy dwarfed in comparison. It's about music above all, the way that it isn't remotely definable but changes everything anyway. It's about jazz in particular and how it shifted from swing to bop in the forties. It's about the trials and tribulations that individual musicians go through and the constantly morphing collaborations they make. And it's about drugs and how the positive side of drugs fuels the music but the negative side kills everything, as epitomised by Slim Watkins, who's dead in the first panel of the book, in a hit and run while he's high on bug juice.

The vaguely sequential side of this follows Jimmy from his earliest years, getting a new bike and attending Catholic school, through to his retirement in old age, as he reminisces about his life in music. He gets that sax and learns how to play it in new and imaginative ways. He's from Fittsville but enrols in City Music College in Bugtown, where his roommate is Slim Watkins. After they add a third musician, Reggie, on double bass, they start to get serious and think about this as a career. They want to be like the Buggy Eckstone Band, who they go to see live at the Savoy. They get hired instead but soon fired as well for those time-honoured musical differences. And by that point, the bug juice is so readily available that it becomes almost impossible not to indulge; especially when it sparks metaphysical trips during performances. And so Bughouse is born.

However, that story doesn't follow a straight line. Steve Lafler, who both wrote and drew it, isn't interested in building suspense about what might happen next. We know Jimmy lives to old age, so we know he's not going to fry his brain on bug juice, however it might appear at any particular moment. We know Slim dies, which means that his part in Jimmy's story is going to end at some point and someone else will presumably take his spot. I believe the point is that these characters could be any musicians, whether in this anthropomorphic bug world or in ours, and the suspense applies to all of them currently alive. They're all walking that balance beam between genius and death.

The more I think about it, the more the cut-and-paste approach isn't just an homage to William S. Burroughs, who popularised it around the time that this book is set, albeit maybe slightly later in the fifties rather than the forties. It's also an homage to the drugs. Musicians like Jimmy and Slim aren't merely playing music, they're reaching for something transcendental that might manifest itself through their performance and bug juice; which may be this world's cocaine but also feels a little like acid, is a way to tap into that. The result is that they're always living in the moment. It's not about what they did last week or what they might do next week. It's all about right now, man, and it always will be. I think Lafler chose to present this story to echo that.

Given that I've mentioned bugs in a dozen different ways already, I should get round to stating in no uncertain terms that Lafler's characters are drawn like human beings who happen to have the heads of insects. Why, I have no idea, except to play along with the ever present bug theme. They aren't one specific type of bug; Lafler runs the gamut of the species. However, they all have arms and fingers just like we do, all the better to play those musical instruments with. Only their heads (and the antennae sticking up from them) differentiate them from us.

I liked this book while I was reading it, but it certainly didn't knock my socks off. Part of that was the way it seemed to be about Jimmy Watts but wasn't really or being broken up into sections that didn't always seem to be in the right place. I wondered as I was reading why Lafler had chosen to frame his story this way. It's also drawn in deceptively simple black and white, appropriately given that it takes place in the era of film noir, with plenty of nods to that genre in drugs and detectives and gangsters and whatnot.

However, I have to say that I liked it more as a subtly blurred memory. Right now, I still remember Jimmy and Slim and Julie and a bunch of other characters. As time passes, they'll blur too, but the general feel will abide. As I mentioned early in my review, this is about a mood and a time and the more I learn about jazz, the more sense it'll make. Is Buggy Eckstone meant to represent a single real jazz musician? Is Jimmy Watts? I don't know enough about jazz to tell. It feels like they might indeed and there's a passing of the torch going on in the background.

Maybe it doesn't matter at all and, as long as we feel what it was like to be a jazz musician in the forties, then Lafler's done a good job. And, while it doesn't feel immersive while reading, it feels more and more immersive when thinking about it afterwards. I don't have the other two books in the series, 'Baja' and 'Scalawag', but it looks like they work in a similar way. Given how this initial book works, I have a feeling they'll add new moods and times into the mix. I'll keep my eyes open. ~~ Hal C F Astell