BB Wolf and the Three LPs

I’m not quite convinced by this. The first name in the title will make you think of two blues giants, and the last term sounds musical too – but you’ll probably have also spotted the fairy tale reading. These two strands are insufficiently integrated, in that while we see BB play the blues a bit, his status as a blues musician is utterly irrelevant to the story and even his character.

The story equates wolves and pigs with blacks and whites in the Mississippi of 90 years ago. Pace Art Spiegelman, I am never convinced of the virtues of telling tales of racism via different types of animals, mostly because I think it exaggerates the differences when we need to go the other way. Also, the difference in physical capability between wolves and pigs makes the power balance hard to read as being so much towards the pigs. I’m also slightly uneasy with “weren’t things bad back then?” stories because I think that is too often a way of eliding what is still bad today, of congratulating ourselves for how things are better.

Bizarrely, anything resembling the real racism of the time and place seems to have been found insufficient as a driver for the story, involving revenge by the wolf – Arnold makes up a law as a way for the Littlepig family to take the Wolf family’s farm from them. I’d have thought there was plenty to motor the revenge story there and then without having to make stuff like that up (assuming I am right, and it wasn’t the reality) – this seems to imply less negativity towards the reality of the time.

So after that, it’s BB Wolf versus the three Littlepig brothers, complete with some cursory gangster stuff and nods to big business. There is too much of a “that’ll do” feel to the story, lots of places where a little more substance was needed. This extends to the lettering – not only a few spelling errors, but the fact that it is visibly pasted on, the art underneath muddying it.

The art’s pretty good, reminding me a bit of Michael Gilbert, with hints at times of Ingels or Wrightson. It struggles here and there (how do you draw wolves kissing without giving them Tex Avery lips?), and it often seems to crop its images a touch too tightly. I also felt it needed extra pages here and there – a good example would be the late yell of “I’m the god damned big bad wolf!” desperately wanting a panel more than a sixth of a page in size, to give the artist the chance to make that moment hit you.

So it’s not bad, and I am impressed by the title, but I think I’d have asked for a bit more in various places in this; it feels like it’s nearly very good, but falls a little short.