Joey Perr, Hands Up, Herbie! (Racketeer Press / Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), 200 pp., $30.
In Hands Up, Herbie!, the comic book artist and author Joey Perr illustrates the life story of his father, the painter and political activist Herb Perr, from his upbringing in Brighton Beach as the son of a smalltime Jewish racketeer, through his eventual escape into the worlds of art, academia, and politics. Told from Herb’s perspective, the book began life as a series of recorded interviews Joey Perr conducted to better understand where his father came from, and in so doing, found himself gaining a context for their sometimes strained relationship. In the book’s inviting introduction, Joey Perr’s avatar - notably identical to how he draws Herb around the same age - tells the reader that his “incurably talkative” and short-tempered father, who was always starting conversations with complete strangers and needing to win arguments with his son, used to drive him nuts. But after painstakingly editing and illustrating Herb’s story, Perr now hopes to “let him have the last word. Or two.” In this way, and others, the book succeeds, delivering an engaging and highly focused narrative of a colorful and noteworthy life, in which figures like Bugsy Siegel, Mark Rothko, and David Rockefeller make not insignificant cameos. But in his modest statement of intent, Perr arguably restricts the work from becoming more than a pleasantly illustrated chronology of anecdotes, and rising above its own origins the same way his father did in life, to transcend transcription, and become more fully and uniquely itself.
The story begins with Herb doing just that, as he moves out of an angry, dysfunctional home at age 14 to get away from his parents, if only to an apartment across the street. His father Jerry’s violent temper and entrenchment in the criminal underworld understandably dominates Herb’s memory of his youth; the family is frequently separated by jail sentences, accosted by repo men, and uprooted for a year on the lam in Miami. Perr is careful to avoid casting blame or judgment on any of his grandfather’s associates, infusing Herb’s stories instead with a touch of the incredulous glee one might feel upon uncovering an excitingly salacious family history. Without shying away from portraying the emotional and physical trauma Jerry’s lifestyle left in its wake - two of Herb’s siblings suffered from lifelong substance addiction - Perr also highlights the ways in which his grandfather’s antisocial tendencies and lawlessness informed Herb’s integrity and politics. “He’d say, ‘They’re all a bunch of crooks, and they’re all out for themselves.’ If anything it moved me to the left. Protesting the war. Not afraid of authority. Questioning authority.” It’s only after Herb wins an art scholarship allowing him to attend NYU that he enters therapy and begins to see the unhealthier aspects of his upbringing. His therapist tells him, “You act like this family of yours is perfectly normal. You don’t show any anger. You’re telling me all these stories without showing emotion.” Shortly thereafter, Herb nearly strangles his father in the heat of a cathartic argument. But the therapist’s observation also resonates as a remark on the equanimity of Joey Perr’s self-effacing authorial presence, which permeates not only his editorial choices but his artistic ones as well.
Nearly every one of the book’s 200 pages is presented in a six-panel layout. Perr’s unwavering commitment to this template demonstrates a talent for culling the most salient moments from what were undoubtedly much longer stories. But coupled with the plainspoken diction and lulling cadence of Herb’s narration, the relentlessness of the gridwork can make events seem to blur together, with little in the way of aesthetic or formal variation to distinguish them. Perr’s art style, with its spare lines and economy of detail, contributes to the impression of a presentation that’s consistent but muted, almost muzzled. This feels, in part, to be a function of professional restraint - in refusing to call attention to his own craftsmanship, Perr allows the story and its reportage to remain the focus. He has honed the illustrations down to their essentials. The irony is that in the graphic novel format, where through the simultaneous, almost pictogrammatic interplay between word and image, an author can convey a sense of mise en scène singularly elevating and wholly unique to that medium, the paring down of the art to its essentials can render it inessential to the narrative. While that is ultimately not the case with Hands Up, Herbie! - though at times a bit spartan, Perr’s Sweet Tart-colored panels and tight composition have a sleekly scrappy, winning charm - one does occasionally wonder what the critical function of the art is.
This same question haunts Herb in his 20s, when, after making some waves in the art world, he changes his style and is accosted by his dealer to reconsider. Collectors, it turns out, had complained that his shifting aesthetic was “devaluing their investment.” With the same free market that had enabled his upward mobility now making clear the parameters of that bargain - namely that artistic expression is appreciated only so far as it can appreciate - Herb decides to stop showing his work in galleries and turns instead to activist art groups.
With Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, he helps organize a boycott of the Whitney Museum - where one of his own paintings is displayed - for failing to incorporate work by female, Native American, and Black artists in an exhibition called “American Art.” With the critic and author Lucy Lippard he co-founds Political Art Documentation and Distribution, whose stated goals include providing “artists with an organized relationship to society.” Herb, of course, raised by a volatile outlaw to be circumspect, has been hungering for just such a relationship his entire life. But he seems to realize this mainly through his recognition of art as an inherently political act.
“Men Are Circles; Men Are Spears” is the title of a show Herb writes and performs with two friends, “to explore the origins of our masculinity, our participation in the patriarchy.” Perr depicts Herb, dressed starkly in black, bathed in a yellow spotlight, monologuing on hating his father, being eschewed by his mother, and having his first, furtive sexual experience under a boardwalk. The piece’s evocative title is never explained, but with the book’s focus on three generations of Perr men, its poetic resonance is unmistakable: escaping the circular, cyclical, and ultimately one-dimensional nature of performed masculinity in American society - “Men Are Circles” - has only been possible not through acquiring depth - the implied pun “Men Are Spheres” - but by striking out past one’s prescribed boundaries, with penetrative violence, and hurling oneself, spearlike, along with all the heft of one’s undetachable lineage, toward the next circle, through the next hoop, into the next target.
Another way out of the cycle is, of course, to notice it - to bathe it in a spotlight - and tell its story in whatever way one is able. Perr, in interviewing his father and publishing this book, has achieved this. But the act of retelling a personal anecdote or memoir in comic book form is inherently revelatory; the artist, upon drawing the scene and crafting and couching the narrative, can’t help but see something new once it’s on the page. And Perr’s choice to tell the story exclusively from his father’s perspective perhaps limits the revelatory capacity of the work; his art is by necessity confined to illustrating words he can’t re-say, or say as himself.
This is, however, clearly a choice, not an oversight. Joey Perr does make a final appearance in the book’s seemingly abrupt, unceremonious conclusion, strolling along Brighton Beach with Herb in 2014. As his father recounts spearfishing with a broomstick tied to a piece of rubber - “We’d pull the rubber all the way to the end of the broomstick…and let go” – Joey Perr is pointedly silent. He’s listening, taking in the story of how the spear was thrown, and maybe seeing how it’s circled back to him. Perhaps he doesn’t need to comment; his father’s last word, in this case, are also his own.
Billy Lopez
Television Writer and Creator
Brooklyn, New York
