Written and Illustrated by Glenn Head
Published by Fantagraphics Books
One of the scariest things one can do is to put one’s self out there, warts and all. I did it myself to a very small extent when I posted online my two year-long blogs annotating my high school journals from the 1970s.
In his new graphic novel memoir, Chartwell Manor, Glenn Head has taken the entire concept of “putting one’s self out there” light years beyond anything I had done.
And it isn’t the first time!
In 2015, Glenn Head had another graphic novel memoir, Chicago. It told the story of how he got established as an artist. If you read it right, Chicago fits right in between the pages of Chartwell Manor and both flesh out each other’s story.
Some of you may remember the real-life drama of Chartwell Manor, the highly-praised boys’ boarding school in New Jersey that fell to scandal in the wake of its pedophilic headmaster’s multiple sex abuse convictions at the end of the 1980s.
I didn’t remember it at all, actually, but as I read Glenn’s book, I looked up the stories in online newspaper archives.
In 1971, Glenn was taken to the school by his parents as a young boy, and his time there affected his life forever.
The book Chartwell Manor is not so much the story of the school and its scandal as it is the story of a man and his struggles in life. We all have struggles, of course, but Glenn Head has had more than his share and he bares them in great detail here—the abuse, drugs, alcohol, sex addiction, parental issues. It’s all here and the masterful way he displays it makes one sympathize with what could well have been an unsympathetic character—himself.
Instead, the unsympathetic character here is, “Sir,” the real-world supervillain whose violence and selfish manipulation of his charges left scores of victims who have never managed to survive anywhere near the level of Glenn himself. Sir, whose image haunted Glenn’s nightmares, his relationships, even his art, until he finally felt compelled to unleash the whole story in this book.
As the author writes in his Foreword, “My experience there had been eating away at me for nearly fifty years. Finally I turned the tables and devoured it.”
Blurbed by no less than Robert Crumb, Justin Green, Peter Bagge, and Noah Van Sciver, four artists whose work it resembles, Crumb calls it a masterpiece, and I think I’d have to agree. With his memoirs, Glenn Head has taken the format pioneered half a century ago by Justin Green’s legendary Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary and evolved it to the next step. The depth of the detail in his art is astonishing—not just his style but the backgrounds, the signs, the posters, the album covers— all of which add depth as well as a sense of time and place.
The depth in his writing similarly pulls you in and even with the skipping around in years, you follow along and you start to feel what he’s feeling—the frustrations, the sense that it didn’t have to be like this.
Chartwell Manor is a disturbing read for me, and for someone who has gone though anything the least bit similar, it would no doubt prove triggering. It is VERY adult. It is also another example of what a true artist can do when left uncensored, to tell the story they have to tell.
For those who wrote off underground comix as just “dirty books” back in the day, this is their real legacy.
Booksteve recommends.
