About a month ago, I was watching Leaf by Leaf, a YouTube channel devoted to books. Its host, Chris Via, talked about an unusual book called Street Cop by Robert Coover with illustrations by Art Spiegelman. I was intrigued and instantly ordered a copy. Unfortunately, the copy that arrived was the French language edition published by Flammarion. I don’t know enough French to read a novel, so I went to the website of the English-language publisher and ordered it. It is part of a series of books published under the name isolarii, which they describe on their website “Our books revive the extinct genre of the same name—the ‘island books’ that emerged at the start of the Renaissance. Bound together were poems, stories, and artworks—each a supposed island, a space that held a singular idea.
“We take up this genre-bending format to navigate the turbulence of our times. Each book is a ready-to-hand island. Together, they are a growing archipelago. Islands from which to view the world anew.”
Their books are tiny. This is a photo of the French edition next to the English. The French edition is quite small—the isolarii edition is miniscule. I wish there were more books published this size—it fits perfectly in one’s pocket.
When I heard Chris Via speak about it, I had never heard of Robert Coover. Based on Street Cop, Coover seems to be a writer of surrealist and somewhat satirical fictions, but as far as I know, his other books may be naturalistic stories of everyday life. But I doubt it. According to Wikipedia, his first novel was published in 1966 (when I was three years old). That said, Street Cop feels like a novel by a much younger writer. It feels very today.
The setting is in a nightmarish futuristic city, where the unnamed protagonist, who is only ever called “the street cop”, appears to be the only human being on a police force consisting of robots and drones. The city is constantly mutating, making maps useless. In order for Street Cop to get around, he has to get instructions from an artificial intelligence called Elektra on his phone. AIs like Elektra seem common in this world. Street Cop understands that they aren’t real people, but he has warm feelings towards Elektra. Coover writes, “They live in the cloud like gods used to do.” Elektra assigns cases to him.
Street Cop was a drug dealer when he was younger, was being pursued by the police, and decided to turn himself in. He went into a police station where the duty cop “was hiring a new street cop and all he wanted was a job-interview. The interview consisted of being asked to describe the first time he got laid.” Despite his criminal background, he was hired on the spot after inventing a suitably entertaining "first fuck” story.
Out on the beat, he encounters a couple floating above the street having sex in mid-air. Apparently a new fad. As he watches them in action, “Their devices stop working, their signals probably blocked by the city, and they plummet. Fortunately, his job description does not include mopping up the street.” The city is a malevolent entity, a government that seems at best indifferent and at worst hostile to its citizens. Coover writes, “People got shot and died like they always had, but not always in that order.”
Street Cop investigates a murder. The corpse seems to have been gummed to death. Street Cop has a series of absurd adventures, including being hijacked by a town car capable of flight: “The car rises through clouds: it’s up here somewhere that Elektra operates.” This is Street Cop’s understanding—although he lives in a highly technological world, he doesn’t really understand technology. A cloud is a cloud.
But ultimately, he discovers a pet shop that specializes in zombie animals called The Pet Shop of the Living Dead. These rotting blobs of protoplasm have their teeth removed so that they don’t accidentally eat their new owners (because they crave human flesh, especially brains). Suddenly the notion of a person being gummed to death makes sense. It seems to be a conspiracy between the ever-malevolent city and the undead pet stores to dispose of the bodies of the homeless and unclaimed.
There is a bit of excitement as robot cops and drones attack Street Cop. He escapes, imagining drones “no doubt filming his frantic waddle all the while for tonight’s breaking comedy.” He ends up naked in the rain, with a tiny bit of undead flesh stuck to his cheek. “Feels like the punchline of some dumbass joke. He’s tearing up. If anyone asks, it’s the drizzle.”
It reminded me a little of Mark Leyner’s books, but Leyner always seemed more interested in getting a laugh. While Street Cop’s situations are funny, the writing isn’t jokey. It is absurd and occasionally wry, but also kind of stupid. It is written at a level that Street Cop would understand, if he can even read.
Art Spiegelman’s art is an important part of Street Cop. The book is not a comic—the illustrations don’t tell a story in sequential panels like a comic. (All of the illustrations here are scanned from the French edition because the English edition is so small that I thought the French edition would produce sharper images.) But the drawings are comics-adjacent. Spiegelman has a reputation for being a cartoonist who can’t draw very well. He famously has to come up with ways of drawing that play to his weaknesses in this regard. If this seems like a harsh judgment of the creator of Maus, one of the greatest comics ever, Spiegelman judges himself this way. In 1993, he collaborated on a two-page story with Maurice Sendak and confessed his failings, perhaps intimidated to be sharing a page with such a maestro.
And I’ve long leaned towards that opinion of Spiegelman’s art myself. But funnily enough, his illustrations for Street Cop have changed my mind. I love them. There are strategies he employs that are very familiar with anyone who knows his work well. He is always quoting the history of comics in his work. For example, on the title page, we see Street Cop standing shoulder to shoulder with a phalanx of robot cops. They are clearly modeled after Jack Kirby’s techno-figures, specifically after Machine Man, a comic Kirby drew for Marvel in the 1970s. (I remember buying the first few issues at my local U-Totem.)
In a bar where Street Cop stops for a drink, it is “Nudie Night” where all the drinkers are naked. Among the patrons are figures from the history of comics like Little Orphan Annie, Mutt and Jeff, Betty Boop, and as Street Cop’s ex-girlfriend, an older, somewhat rundown Nancy.
In the Pet Store of the Living Dead, the owner directly references the Crypt-Keeper from EC’s Tales From the Crypt. Almost every line Spiegelman draws refers to some aspect of the history of comics. That is amusing to someone like me who knows this history, but I wonder how Jane and Joe Average perceive them. In any case, I was impressed by his drawings here, and their inclusion added a lot to the novel—Street Cop simply would not have been as entertaining without Spiegelman’s art.
I can’t wait to see what isolarii publishes next.
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Street Cop
Great post! I really enjoyed this. On the comics front, I learn a lot from you.