(++++) ART FOR OUR SAKE

Doodleville. By Chad Sell. Random House Graphic. $12.99.

Doodleville #2: Art Attacks! Random House Graphic. $12.99.

     A visual celebration of visual art, and a paean specifically to the Art Institute of Chicago, Chad Sell’s Doodleville graphic novels are multi-ethnic, multicultural preteen adventures that subsume the usual notions of friendship and teamwork within a world that straddles the border between real-world art and kid-imagined creations. The realistic backdrop of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the use within the books of actual art from the museum and actual characters from within the art, combine to produce effects that are reminiscent of the “moving and participating paintings and statues” scenes from the Harry Potter books and films. Art is very much a two-way street in these books – but when you think about it, art is always a two-way street, with the artist presenting a concept to an audience and the audience in turn reacting to what the artist has done (possibly in ways very different from those the artist expected or wanted).

     The basic concept here is that art lives – really­ lives. Primary protagonist Drew (a perfect name for someone around whose drawings the story is centered) draws good-natured, amusing doodles that meander around the page and off it, having small adventures and interacting with the world at large on their own terms (which tend to be mischievous ones). The small magic of these doodles is known to Drew’s parents and other adults – this is a world where the self-awareness and animation of art are just the way things are – and Drew’s folks are accepting of the occasional misfiring of doodle activities, since the small creatures have minds of their own (despite being derived from Drew’s mind, which is part of the foundation here). The doodles need a place of their own to call home, so Drew creates Doodleville, and Drew’s creations also interact with those of the four other members of the Art Club and those kids’ own creations. The club is run by Mr. Schneider, who challenges the kids to “think big.” Drew interprets that to mean creating a really large, powerful doodle, so she comes up with Leviathan, a snakelike creature with a big, toothy head and, like all her doodles, a mind of its own. Things quickly go awry when Drew takes her doodles to the Art Institute, knowing she should not do so, and they get into trouble by interacting with well-known paintings, in one case removing and keeping a baby’s hat. There is additional difficulty when Leviathan (now simply called Levi) chows down on part of a city doodle drawn by another Art Club member, leading to a fight that quickly gets out of hand – and causes Drew to cross out Levi altogether by drawing in black all over him. But that simply turns Levi to the, well, dark side, and much of the first Doodleville book involves figuring out how to control or stop Levi while also dealing with a highly unpleasant museum patron who objects to “entitled little girls who think their scribbles have any place in the halls of this institute.” The introduction of a painting of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray starts to pull Doodleville in another direction, and when the book ends, an attempt to return the baby’s hat to the appropriate painting has misfired and…well, cue Art Attacks!

     The second book rings a series of changes on the events of the first, pulls the focus away from Levi, has the nasty museum lady turn out to be just fine and a big help to the Art Club, and becomes more of a magic-vs.-science story. The primary elements here are two actual paintings found at the Art Institute of Chicago, Charles Willson Peale’s portrait of Hannah Duncan and her baby and Ivan Albright’s Dorian Gray portrait that was created for the 1945 film adaptation of Wilde’s book. With the baby and its hat at the center of things, Hannah and Dorian get into a major conflict, in which each recruits suitable characters from other art works and engages in full-scale hostility – Hannah believing Dorian is responsible for her baby being missing, and Dorian being furious because his cat statue (as seen in Albright’s actual painting) has been destroyed. The Art Club kids try to help, but they manage only to make things worse when they take Hannah’s side (since Dorian’s appearance means he must be the bad guy). A misfiring magic spell turns Dorian into a truly amazing-looking monster whose head has a single eye and huge teeth on one half and four eyes on the other, a kind of mixture of Dali and surrealism with a touch of horror films thrown in. The Art Club kids and the now-helpful Cornelia Krong, for whom the Krong Wing of American Art is named, have a lot to unravel here, and Sell tries to give the kids themselves some additional personality as they seek a satisfactory way out: minor art-based conflicts (the whole magic-vs.-science element, with Sell more on the “magic” side since, after all, art is a kind of magic) are made to reflect the kids’ different personalities and concerns – “Some things can’t be explained. Some things are weird. And wonderful. They’re strange and creepy and more incredible than you could ever imagine.” (But of course both magic and science turn out to be necessary.)

     It is worth mentioning that Sell determinedly makes sociopolitical points in the Doodleville books in addition to telling a fascinatingly intricate story. The Art Club kids are perfectly balanced by skin color, ethnicity and personal predilections. There is a boy who insists on female pronouns; there are “magical butterfly boyfriends” who go on dates and are only strong when they are together (perhaps based on Sell and his husband); and so forth. Clearly the only real enemies come from a single group: “Anything’s better than these old white guys in wigs.” In fact, Drew becomes quite determined not to harm the now-monstrous Dorian, deciding that he has suffered more than enough and, as it turns out, was not responsible for Hannah’s missing baby after all. It is through cooperation and teamwork – among the Art Club kids and between the humans and the characters from paintings – that the Doodleville books come to a solid, satisfactory conclusion. Sell’s ability to interweave graphic-novel-style versions of characters from real art at the Art Institute of Chicago with the Art Club kids and the kids’ own artistic creations results in a multilayered story that proceeds at a breakneck pace while absorbing readers in a world that almost exists. The books are very clever, despite their sometimes heavy-handed societal point-scoring. And even though the Art Club kids (aside from Drew) are less interesting than the escapees from Art Institute paintings, the sheer sweep of the story and the excellent graphic-novel art with which Sell tells it make Doodleville a place worth visiting repeatedly – although a trip to the actual Art Institute of Chicago would be even more enlightening (if less frenetic).