200 pgs. B & W | $24.99 hardcover | W: Loo Hui Phang; A: Hughes Micol
At a time when Hollywood had two categories of actors—White and everything else—Maximus Wyld was a casting agent’s dream come true. Born Maximus Ohanzee Wildhorse, with ancestry including Native American, Mexican, African American, and Chinese, he could play any ethnicity and was blessed with good looks and physical abilities that might have led to stardom were his skin of a lighter hue. In his case, they did ensure that he would be cast again and again in movies large and small, allowing him to pass through the history of Hollywood like a multi-ethnic Forrest Gump. Wyld wasn’t just a self-serving chameleon, either, but packed his performances with secret signs and messages that got by the censors but communicated perfectly clearly to those in the know.
If you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of Maximus Wyld, there’s a simple explanation: he’s not real and none of this ever happened. Instead, Wyld is an invention of author Loo Hui Phang, a device that allows her to explore what it must have been like to be a non-White actor in Hollywood during the Golden Age, and how some talented people managed to find a way to succeed in a game that was stacked against them. It’s an interesting conceit that sometimes works, but frequently doesn’t, making reading Erased a frustrating experience.
When a fictional story is told with an absolutely straight face, over 200 large-format (8.5 x 11) pages, it had better deliver a punch equal to the time and effort invested by the reader. Instead, Erased often feels like a transcript of a film studies lecture was forced into speech bubbles to be spoken by characters inhabiting a semi-fictional world populated largely by recognizable representations of show biz luminaries like Cary Grant, Rita Hayworth, and John Ford. The bizarre mismatch between the earnestness of much of the dialogue and the sometimes wild flights of fancy in the story grated on my nerves and set me to wondering what it would be like if the characters in one of Kevin Williamson’s Scream movies were completely lacking in self- and genre-awareness. I think we can agree that the results of that experiment would probably not be good.
That Erased works at all is in large part due to Hughes Micol’s art, which uses a fairly realistic pen and ink style to create everything from workmanlike sequences of frames that get the job done (which is to say, have the characters deliver the text) to attention-getting full-page drawings in which the words are interspersed throughout the landscape so they act as enhancement rather than the main attraction.
One thing a graphic novel should never be is dull—after all, life is short and there are more books in the world than anyone will ever have time to read, so it’s reasonable to expect some return on whatever time you invest in reading any particular book. That return can be entertainment, knowledge, understanding, or any number of other things, but it can’t be boredom. Sad to say, I was frequently bored while reading Erased. I keep wanting to like it, but my best efforts were defeated by the incessant expo-speak and unnecessarily obvious references to real people and movies. But that kind of thing could be someone else’s favorite cup of tea, and if you’re the kind of person who likes to congratulate yourself on spotting references to real people, historical events, and well-known movie scenes (even if they are soon after identified in the text as well), you may well love Erased. In any case, it’s based on an interesting idea and is dealing with serious issues that remain relevant today, so may be worth a look for those reasons alone. | Sarah Boslaugh
You can see a sample of the art for Erased, and access several interviews with author Loo Jui Phang, on the nbm website.
