Credit Where It's Due: A Few Stray Thoughts On The Brilliance Of Marzena Sowa and Sylvain Savoia's "Marzi: A Memoir"

1. The Strange Persistent Obsession With Auteurship

Like a great many others, I'm convinced Marzena Sowa and Sylvain Savoia's Marzi: A Memoir is a masterpiece. But I'm not convinced that the credit for the book's brilliance is always appropriately shared out. There's long been a tendency when discussing comics to concentrate on the supposed auteurship of the writer. For a variety of reasons, including the relative difficulty of recognising and describing the vital contributions of artistic collaborators, their contributions tend to get short shift. That tendency - as misleading as it is manifestly unfair - is only intensified when it comes to stories that are as emotionally captivating and politically powerful as Marzena Sowa's.

Marzi: A Memoir depicts the first stages of Sowa's coming of age in the Poland of the Seventies and Eighties. If the stories were nothing but local explorations of that universal theme, they'd still be undeniably beguiling. But Sowa goes far further. Her reminiscences spell out with forensic precision how everything she and fellow citizens experienced was constrained and frequently wounded by Poland's Communist dictatorship. In that, Marzi: A Memoir is also a record of accommodations made with and challenges offered to tyranny on any number of levels. This brilliantly woven combination of personal memoir and political history lends Sowa's book much of its uniquely fascinating appeal.

Understandably, this enchanting cocktail of fascinating reminiscences, sociological detail and world-changing events informs Marzi: A Memoir with a particularly powerful sense of authenticity. Yet it in no way diminishes either Sowa's personal experiences or writerly achievements if Sylvain Savoia's essential contributions to the memoir are similarly lauded. Somehow, this rarely appears to happen. Oddly, even the covers of the English translations of the book credit Marzi: A Memoir predominantly to Marzena Sowa with, in smaller type, a credit given to "art by Sylvain Savoia". Why this should be so is difficult to grasp. It surely can't be any measure of contempt at all on Sowa's part for a man who is her partner as well as her collaborator.  It seems highly improbable that the billing on the graphic novel is anything other than a show of sincere respect by Savoia. But that doesn't mean that his contributions should be underplayed, if not even largely ignored, when Marzi: A Memoir is written about. Sowa herself doesn't in any way diminish Savoia's contributions in the English language interviews with her I've read. Quite the opposite is true. Why then would anyone else?

The facts of history, both individual and societal, as presented in Marzi: A Memoir lend it an unimpeachable air of truthfulness. Yet we've all experienced historical works that, for all their attention to accuracy and detail, convince not a whit. It is the brilliance with which Sowa and Savoia together depict their subject that persuades. As a team, Sowa and Savoia convincingly portray a society that is, to those of us who didn't experience Poland in that period, both profoundly unfamiliar and yet entirely relatable. Accordingly, the experiences they depict resonate in both political as well as personal terms. The result is a book that it's difficult to leave behind. The tyranny that they depict on so many levels seems uncomfortably familiar at moments today. There is a sense that Poland's past might in some appalling ways prefigure our own tomorrows. Yes, the collaboration between writer and artist that's Marzi: A Memoir has resulted in a book that's by turns moving and amusing, joyous and terrifying. But Sowa and Savoia's work also reads like a warning of how dictatorships survive, and of the accommodations they demand, and of how hard it is to resist, and of how necessary it is to do so.

Such an achievement, and a towering achievement it is, surely insists that all involved receive a fair measure of attention and acknowledgement. The myth of the comics writer as auteur rarely does anything but obscure the truth. How odd it is, that we all surely recognise that comics is a collaborative medium, and yet, the fact of that is so often ignored in reviews and articles.

2. Three Favourite Pages/Panels

It's often a mark of the greatest storytelling, that the artist's work appears at first glance to be almost incidental to the story being told. Here, Savoia brings both perfect clarity and an enticing measure of action and variety to a succession of panels that could have easily appeared both confused and tedious. The charm of the cartooning is clear to see, but there's a commitment to making the page compelling without self-importantly disturbing the flow of events that's less obvious. And so, the use of extreme perspective in the second panel succeeds in both being audacious and informing, but it doesn't haul the reader out of the story with an overwhelming excess of virtuosity. Instead, it works seamlessly as part of what's surely Sowa & Savoia's intention to subtly juxtapose the experience of the adults and the children in their cast. The world of the apartment blocks that the kids take for granted as a playground is simultaneously a prison of sorts to their adult inhabitants, crowded, constraining, drab and distinctly uninviting. That intimidating view from the heights in the second panel only underscores how far away the world outside is. So too, we're steered to feel, is any idea of freedom, let alone play, for those who aren't children anymore. 

Tens of pages later and we're returned, not for the first time, to the world of the estates and their tower blocks. Here script and art accentuate how communism eventually steals away even the minor blessings of the concrete playgrounds and the moments of private joy they permitted. In the wake of the radioactive disaster of Chernobyl, Marzi's life has contracted to silence and isolation. The very idea of tomorrow and the ever-limited options it held has diminished to an unending uncertainty. The stillness expressed in Savoia's panels is that of a horror movie, of the moment of apparent normality that's actually the manifestation of an irresistible horror. None of the frames insist that the eye stares for any longer than a brief glance. It's the well-guided progression from quietly despairing image to image that, with the unnervingly restrained text, cumulatively suggests an empty, motionless, hopeless world. (It is to shudder, to imagine an artist that wanted to tinge this page with melodrama, with attention-seeking storytelling, with the spuriously and over-obviously dramatic.) None of this is to suggest that Savoia simply imposed his judgement upon Sowa's script. The conviction that writers write and artists cartooning with an absolute division of labour between the two tasks is an absurd one. But it to say that the collaboration, however it worked, resulted in hundreds of pages marked by admirable and effective storytelling.

Perhaps my favourite moment in the whole graphic novel is this, where the energy and good humour of Savoia's art ensures that Marzi's blooming beliefs don't come across as brow-beating and angstful. Sowa's decision to leave this moment until almost 200 pages into the book shows again how remarkably good she is at constructing her narrative. If delivered too quickly and without a great deal of scene-setting, Marzi's questions might have read as an adult's beliefs placed polemically into a child's mouth. But since we've been shown how Marzi's politics have developed in a subtle and detailed way, her politics here appear both logical and credible. But for all of that, the choices on display in this panel avoid any possibility at all of the moment appearing over-wrought. Even his opting to make Marzi's cry of distress so relatively small and faint is perfectly judged. On the one hand, it accentuates Marzi's powerlessness and in doing so justifies her questioning exasperation at Poland's state. But at the same time, that tiny "eeeek" is also undeniably amusing, and in being so, it again helps to undercut even the slightest possibility of over-worthiness.