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Summary
Summary
"A story about storytelling...Conjures up the grindhouse movie-making scene in 1970s Los Angeles and tracks an ambitious young man's flailing attempts to build a family and a career as a film arteest in that debased world...A book with a lot of heart." -Art Spiegelman, bestselling author of MAUS
Fourteen years in the making, renowned and beloved graphic novelist Sammy Harkham finally delivers his epic story of artistic ambition, the heartbreak it can bring, and what it means to be human
YOU CAN BURN IN HELL
Set primarily in Los Angeles in 1971, Blood of the Virgin is the story of twenty‑seven‑year‑old Seymour, an Iraqi Jewish immigrant film editor who works for an exploitation film production company. Sammy Harkham brings us into the underbelly of Los Angeles during a crucial evolutionary moment in the industry from the last wheeze of the studio system to the rise of independent filmmaking.
Seymour, his wife, and their new baby struggle as he tries to make it in the movie business, writing screenplays on spec and pining for the chance to direct. When his boss buys one of his scripts for a project called Blood of the Virgin and gives Seymour the chance to direct it, what follows is a surreal, tragicomic making-of journey. As Seymour's blind ambition propels the movie, his home life grows increasingly fraught. The film's production becomes a means to spiral out into time and space, resulting in an epic graphic novel that explores the intersection of twentieth‑century America, parenthood, sex, the immigrant experience, the dawn of early Hollywood, and, shockingly, the Holocaust.
Like a cosmic kaleidoscope, Blood of the Virgin shifts and evolves with each panel, widening its context as the story unfolds, building an intricate web of dreams and heartbreak, allowing the reader to zoom in to the novel's core- the bittersweet cost of coming into one's own.
Author Notes
SAMMY HARKHAM is an award-winning cartoonist and editor, born and raised in Los Angeles. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts and the Mayanot Institute in Jerusalem, where he created the ongoing comics anthology Kramers Ergot , considered to be one of the most influential publications of its kind. His first collection of short comics stories, Everything Together , won the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Graphic Novel. Harkham's work has been published in The Best American Comics , The New York Times , Vice , and McSweeney's , among many other publications. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Sydney.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
L.A. Times Book Prize winner Harkham (Crickets) delivers an ambitious panoramic period piece set in the early-1970s Hollywood exploitation film milieu. Seymour, a 20-something Iraqi Jewish immigrant, works as an editor for Reverie, a production company specializing in cheap grindhouse flicks. He's eager to direct his own script, and finally gets his shot with Blood of the Virgin after the original director is fired. Harkham spends a generous amount of the narrative detailing the grueling, often heartless day-to-day work of filmmaking, and in parallel, Seymour's increasingly stressful home life. His smart, tart-tongued wife, Ida, is exhausted from caring for their infant son, resulting in misunderstandings, frustration, and Seymour's increasingly wandering eye toward an actor in his film. (The ruthless studio head, Val, casually tells Seymour, "Don't get so down, your marriage won't last.") Harkham vividly depicts the perils of ambition and heartbreak inherent in collaborative creative projects, while glimpses into Hollywood history cleverly link Seymour to historical figures who were sacrificed to an oppressive studio system. Pages are stacked with close panels and thin line drawings that capture choice moments from back lots to late nights. Harkham's accomplished cartooning, nuanced characters, and sharp period detail keep this sprawling tale thrumming with energy and painful insights. Agent: Liz Parker, Verve Talent and Literary Agency. (May)
Guardian Review
I mean it as a compliment when I say that Sammy Harkham's Blood of the Virgin is a very nerdy kind of comic; if you're a fan of cartoonists such as Joe Matt or Seth, and their intense feeling for lonely, hapless men, you'll find plenty to enjoy here. Like some of their work, superficially it's a nostalgic beast, one set mostly in the Los Angeles film industry. It's 1971, the year of Dirty Harry, Diamonds Are Forever and The French Connection, though you'd never know it: in Harkham's universe, the Hollywood sign is far, far away. But there's a lot going on here besides. Its hero, Seymour, is a 27-year-old movie editor at an exploitation film company who also happens to be a Jewish Iraqi immigrant. If the book is about one man's struggle to become an artist in a city that cares nothing for losers, it's also about the Jewish experience in the period when thousands of Holocaust survivors were still around to tell their stories. It is, in other words, as much about inherited guilt as it is about rank ambition. Seymour, self-absorbed and chaotic, spends his days in the dark, splicing together the terrible B-movies churned out by his toad-like boss, Val. His days are long, and at the end of them, he goes home to a small baby, his first child, who's apt to let neither one of his parents get any sleep. In the small rented house he shares with his wife, tension is sky-high, and not only because of Junior. Ida feels neglected by her husband, and as an Ashkenazi (her family's roots are Hungarian), she 's treated like an alien by Seymour's relatives. Half the time, they refuse even to believe she is Jewish. While the couple dote on their son - "Put him between two slices of bread and eat him all up!" says Ida, when Seymour admits he could squeeze him half to death - they kvetch constantly, and eventually, Ida disappears to New Zealand to be with her silent, damaged parents. But perhaps it's as well she's away. Seymour is about to plunge head-first into a prolonged state of crisis. First, Val buys one of his scripts, Blood of the Virgin. Then he fires the movie's director, at which point Seymour gets the chance to replace him. What follows is in some ways predictable: a tale of too-small budgets, wooden actors and constant interference from above (naturally, Harkham gives us a preview of part of the film in full colour, one of several stories within his story). What's less predictable is Seymour's response to it all. Is all this what he has longed for? Sometimes, he wonders. If Harkham's portrayal of LA's seedy, grindhouse scene is pitch-perfect - here are the parties and the valet parking, the cheapskate shortcuts and the abuse - it's his Sephardic protagonist we see the more clearly: an outsider whose roots ground him and ensure he is the eternal stranger. Already praised by the great Art Spiegelman (Maus), this singular book has taken 14 years to complete - it appeared first in instalments, in Harkham's own comic book series, Crickets - and it's not hard to see why. With its flashbacks both to the Holocaust and to pre-Saddam Iraq, its scope is panoramic, even as its narrative is mostly (almost obsessively) focused on a world that is not only seamy, but also intensely parochial. I don't know if Blood of the Virgin is, as some are saying, a masterpiece; it is a massive book in every way, and I'm still settling it in my mind. But it does feel to me like a classic in the making: a book to be reread, and talked about, late into the night.
Kirkus Review
The monsters aren't just on screen in this lurid graphic novel from Harkham about a horror-film editor with dreams of directing, his dissatisfied wife, his manipulative boss, and his alcoholic and occasionally violent colleagues. Seymour loves horror movies and came to Hollywood to make them. In 1971, he mostly works as an editor at a small studio, but one day his boss wants to buy a script that Seymour has been shopping around. Despite his initial hesitation that the script isn't right for the film his boss wants to make to satisfy an investor, Seymour seizes the opportunity. His commitment to his work causes tension with his wife, Ida, who regularly berates him for neglecting household responsibilities but tolerates the all-night, drug-fueled debaucheries Seymour attends at his boss's mansion. Though Ida repeatedly rebuffs Seymour's amorous advances, while he's away she pleasures herself on the couch while their baby wails from another room. When the shoot of Seymour's script faces logistical pressures, the studio gives Seymour an even bigger opportunity (enough rope to hang himself with?), and Ida takes their son on an open-ended visit to her family in New Zealand, where she spends time with childhood friends, including an old flame. Harkham weaves a psychologically complex tale, balancing the bad behavior of Hollywood with an intriguingly pragmatic look at the moviemaking process. Seymour's passion for film and his conflicted conscience keep us reasonably sympathetic to him as he self-destructs, perhaps mostly because of his desire for Ida even as his stresses and urges don't exactly keep him committed to her. Harkham's text delivers punchy banter and sly sound effects, while his exceptionally expressive art is equal parts comic strip and cinema. A finely crafted look at the complexities and grotesqueries of Hollywood and the human heart. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In Los Angeles in the early 1970s, Seymour is an immigrant trying to make his mark in the movie business by editing films. With an unpredictable schedule, his wife Ida finds him undependable as a husband and father. When he finally gets the opportunity to make his own movie, Seymour deals with increasing conflicts at home while trying to balance out all of his responsibilities. The story as a whole is split up into smaller interconnected stories, and while most focus on Seymour, other characters, including Ida and her family in Auckland, are featured. The tone of the stories is different as well; one story is about a member of Ida's family who is a Holocaust survivor, though most of the others contain humor. The use of many small, linear panels is reminiscent of comic strips, though the illustration style is more detailed than those typically found in newspapers. Fans of slice-of-life narratives will enjoy the quick setting changes, and fans of character-driven works will sympathize with Seymour and Ida.
Library Journal Review
Los Angeles in the early 1970s proves fertile ground to explore artistic ambition, the immigrant experience, generational trauma, and the cost of maintaining unbending principles in Harkham's (Everything Together: Collected Stories) magnum opus. The story concerns a married couple, Seymour and Ida. He was born in Iraq, she's the daughter of Holocaust survivors who resettled in New Zealand after World War II. He's an editor for one of the seediest B-movie production houses in town, but dreams of writing and directing his own films; she struggles to maintain a sense of her own identity while raising their newborn child mostly alone, as Seymour is too consumed with frustration at his lack of artistic fulfillment to worry about anyone else. When a producer decides to produce a heavily revised version of one of Seymour's scripts, he discovers that achieving a compromised version of his dream is just as difficult as maintaining a dream deferred. Unable to endure his tortured artist anxiety any longer, Ida returns to New Zealand--maybe for good, unless Seymour can get his act together. VERDICT A stunningly ambitious, emotionally complex work from an artist with a distinct perspective on the pursuit of artistic fulfillment.