I’ve unwittingly become the Stanley Kubrick of comic books. I don’t mean that I have even a fraction of the famous director’s talent, drive, or vision. I’ve always respected his work, but he’s from a completely different headspace, and he’s left a legacy larger than anything I could ever do.

Yet, there is a similarity between Kubrick and me. He had a habit of throwing books at the wall in his office due to either disinterest or complete disgust with most of the novels and screenplays he was reading.

For those who aren’t familiar with Kubrick, he directed one film a decade. He was no Woody Allen in terms of productivity, but when he released that one film . . . whoa boy. That one film would always be based on a novel or screenplay that kept his attention for more than a half hour.

At any rate, I go through the doldrums at times with comics, and I get to a point where four or five separate books are lying half-finished or abandoned. They loom at me, but I move on because I don’t have the time to read semi-interesting comics. With multiple assignments spanning multiple zines, print papers, and magazines, I literally don’t have the time to read the massive stack of new comic and old favorites.

Jonathan Ames’s The Alcoholic didn’t just grab me, it spoke to me. It didn’t hit the wall after I came home with it. It didn’t get dropped on the literal top of the heap of books I have yet to read or finish, and which is quickly approaching critical mass. Call it my Clockwork Orange (not that I’m going to be making a film of it as Kubrick did with Anthony Burgess’s novel). It was that good.

The Alcoholic is poignant, beautifully written, and well drawn. This obviously autobiographical memoir in comic form joins the tradition that Are Spiegelman’s Maus, Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve, and Joe Matt’s Peep Show have worked so hard to pave the way for--three very different auto-bio books, but if you know the genre, you’ll appreciate my wide relation of references.

The Alcoholic is about Ames’s progression of childhood problem-drinking, co-dependency, a flair for obsessive compulsive disorder, the romanticism of drinking and writing, literary influences who have maintained their love for strong drink, and an open ending that may upset some but sits just right with me. Open endings are not a bad thing.

After a bumpy 136 pages of confession, binging, purging, detox and counseling, the author probably isn’t sure if he’s hit his rock bottom with a capital “R”--so the reader is left with one full frame of our anti-hero (slightly off his center of balance) vowing never to drink while passing by a bar with a happy hour sign. Oh, that was a spoiler alert. Big surprise, right?

The story that Ames tells is a common one that touches on more than just a few personal tectonic points. As a bar reviewer, it is my business to have a high tolerance. Draw your own conclusions on that one. This isn’t about me or Kubrick, though, but I definitely related to The Alcoholic.

And the best paragraph in the book happens just as our central character is stumbling his way into the third arc of the story. The world is rocked by 9/11. Ames doesn’t cash in on the historical event, but merely remarks years afterward on how it affected him, his neighbors in New York and the rest of our nation:

It’s perhaps too apt a metaphor, but collectively man was like a gigantic alcoholic--he knew better but he couldn’t help but destroy himself and everything around him.

This is what they refer to as a “moment of clarity” in Alcoholics Anonymous. Ames pinballs between dry streaks and pickled streaks but still manages to maintain his intellect, wit, and charm as a humble writer.

Dean Haspiel does a phenomenal job illustrating the surreal out-of-body experiences and the imagery that Ames conjures with his sentence structures. However, I have one very tiny bone to pick with the letterer, Pat Brosseau. His “I”s are too bold. They stand out in the panel above and beyond the rest of his very-well-done letters.

If you’ve ever had a drop (or, in my case, the entire single-malt barrel in one sitting), The Alcoholic is a must-read. The ending is open because even the writer is unsure which direction he may take after the book closes.

This book was good enough for me to seek out some of Ames’s prose novels in bookstores so that I can continue reading the rest of his journey as a writer. The odds are in his favor that those books won’t be hitting the wall (or the top of the coffee table in the living room, either).

A quick thank you to Ian from Don’s Atomic Comics in Depew, NY, for giving me this book as a belated birthday gift “from one alcoholic to another.” Well played, sir, well played.

Tom Waters lives and writes in Lancaster, NY. He is the other of seven books (mostly rants, some poetry), a weekly columnist for Night Life magazine, a pod cast radio host and a celebrity interviewer and bar reviewer for the Buffalo News. For more information, click over to: www.tomfoolery4.wordpress.com.

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