An image from Nikolai Maslov's graphic novel Siberia, released in the UK this spring
In my youth I was heavily into comics, and although when I moved to Moscow in 1997 the passion had largely waned, I was still sufficiently interested in the medium to go in search of the Russian variety. I was hoping to discover a weird parallel universe - a soviet Superman maybe, or a Siberian equivalent to Moebius' Arzach. But I quickly learned that though Russia had a rich children's literature, comics were non-existent. Soviet cultural commissars had condemned them as degenerate, semi-literate rubbish and banned the form before it had a chance to take root. I understood their point of view - DC's classic 80-page giant Super-Heroes Battle Super-Gorillas was indeed absolute trash. But then, that was the point - and the fun.
After a few years, comics started to appear on Moscow newsstands, though these were usually translations of American brands that came with Hollywood blockbusters attached, such as X-Men or Spider Man. In Moscow the MARs gallery held an annual exhibition of indigenous product, but the work on display - derivative, poorly drawn, and with very weak visual grammar - reminded me of Detsl, the biggest star in Russian hip-hop. This teenager in dreadlocks, constantly wittering on about "Jah", just happened to be the son of the head of Russian MTV. And a moron. Russian comics were like this: a bad aping of an alien form, poorly understood by people who desperately wanted to be cool.
But after ten years of scepticism I just put down one of the best comics I've ever read, and it's 100% Russian: Siberia, by Nikolai Maslov. The story behind the book's existence is itself fascinating. One day the publisher of the Russian edition of Tintin was approached at a book fair by a short, stocky man with the face of a Siberian peasant. This was Maslov, a fifty-year-old night watchman at a Moscow warehouse. Maslov showed him three pages of an autobiographical comic he had drawn and effectively demanded $200 a month so he could complete it. The publisher, a Frenchman, was impressed enough to agree. It took Maslov three years to finish the book, after which it was published in France to considerable acclaim and then, last October, in the US.
And so, Siberia was created by a man working in complete isolation, and, as he had grown up in a comics vacuum, without any real artistic precursors either. And yet in 93 pages Maslov skillfully presents scenes from his life in a sequence of eerie, beautiful soft pencil sketches (this in itself is highly unorthodox as comic art is usually "finished" with ink) and in doing so, he opens up a territory not only unexplored in comics but also rarely written about in books, at least not any translated into English.
Maslov retrieves from oblivion the unheroic existence of soldiers and labourers in the Russian provinces between the late 50s and 70s - a vast, hopeless landscape of endless space and trees, whose beauty cannot be destroyed by the junk humans deposit there - whether it be telegraph poles, rolls of cable, hand-drawn propaganda posters or any of the other items that Maslov captures with astonishing precision. Dispassionately, he passes through a series of incidences - two pages here, a page there - depicting a life of futile toil, crushed hopes, pointless violence, useless death and vodka-sodden despair. It is magnificently bleak. And yet Maslov never wallows, or labours the point. He moves swiftly, and the years of his life slip by: we see him abandoning his military unit in Mongolia and getting lost in the wasteland, walking over to a beautiful bridge only to find it defaced with graffiti that reads:
"Your mother's a whore! The sarge is a fag!"
Later, in an outhouse, he stumbles upon a wizened drunk so obliterated by alcohol he can't find his way out; then he returns from a swim with friends to find the earth at his feet spitting up human skeletons. Maslov allows himself few words - but all of them leave a stamp on the memory, and it is at this point that he verbalises the question the whole book seems to be struggling with:
"How many Russians rotted here, vanishing without trace, and for what?"
In recent years it's become fashionable to praise and occasionally bestow prizes upon "adult" graphic novels. Many of them are not as good as they are alleged to be. Siberia, however, is the real thing. Hopefully, when it is published in the UK this spring it will receive the attention it deserves.
