Easy but deep reading over a long, lazy Labor Day weekend

“Do you know Bazooka Joe bubble gum?” Krimstein asks as he describes how to approach graphic-novel cynics who live on this side of the Atlantic. “Yeah, yeah, the stuff that breaks your teeth, yeah? That has a little comic in it, right? You can read that, right? Yeah. So you can read a graphic novel.”

His last three graphic novels — or bandes dessinées, as he likes to refer to them, using the original French term for the literary genre — are of the historical nonfiction kind. Einstein in Kafkaland is set in 1911-1912 Prague, a city Krimstein explores with ink and watercolor. There, we meet Albert Einstein — father, embarrassed scientist, dreamer, and still a nobody, as Krimstein describes him at first — as he walks the streets and alleys and up and down medieval staircases to meet future friends and colleagues in offices and living rooms and to discuss theories on park benches. The illustrations and the blues and greens and grays render the book a work of art.

To draw and paint the city, Krimstein traveled to Prague during a lull in the pandemic, stayed for a month, and got to roam this medieval city devoid of crowds. “A professor told me, ‘You are so lucky. Prague has not been that empty since Einstein was there,’” Krimstein says.

“The Old Town Square at night must have been pretty much like the Old Town Square at night when Einstein was there, except for gaslights,” Krimstein adds of his time in the Czech capital. “And it’s a labyrinth, truly a labyrinth. And without crowds, you can capture the feeling. Now, a great writer, you know, Dickens, can do that with words. But with all due respect to Dickens, it might take him 12 impeccable pages to describe what I can, if I’m lucky, give a hint of with a drawing.”

Prague was an interim city for Einstein. He was struggling with his work centered on gravity, had a growing family and not much money, and his marriage paid the price. In Prague, he took his first position as chair at a university, and during the year and a half he spent there, he made some of his most significant discoveries.

“Prague was the quintessential ‘second city,’” Krimstein says. “It was the second city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was industrial, and that matters: I believe that in Prague, Einstein and Kafka [who met in real life and also meet in the book] were able to show that art and science are very, very close to each other, far closer than many people would have us believe.

“In Prague, Einstein was driven by wonder, and Kafka was driven by what’s real,” Krimstein adds. “You know, that should be the other way around, really, but the net result was there. And Prague is a city steeped in wonder. You keep overturning rocks there, and it’s like, ‘Oh, this is the house where Faust lived.’”

YOU AND A BIKE AND A ROAD by Eleanor Davis, Fantagraphics, July 2024, 172 pages

Cycling is easy — really easy. Unless, of course, you decide to cross the country on your bike, and your knees don’t want you to.

Which is exactly what Eleanor Davis (and her knees) decided to do — alone — as she and her husband, Drew Weing, also a comic artist, were about to move from Tucson, Arizona, to Athens, Georgia, and were planning to have a baby.

“It was now or in 20 years,” Davis writes. She had dreamt of such a bike trip for ages and also hoped it would help her with her mental health.

Davis is an award-winning illustrator and cartoonist whose works have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and National Geographic. Her graphic novel You and a Bike and a Road, out in a new and second hardback edition this summer, has a “sketched” essence to it that makes the book look rough and not as sophisticated as her other published works. And no wonder: She illustrated and wrote the majority of the book while on the road, under canvas, at diners, as she’d lay exhausted under a tree and hoped to rest her poor knees. Some of the pages that look cleaner, she completed once she returned home.

“Initially, I brought some pens and some colored pencils,” she says of the art materials she carried in her panniers and other bags. “But when you’re bike touring, you get really obsessed about weight, and so I ended up cutting down and even mailing chunks [of illustrations] back home as I finished them, just to save on weight. So it was a much more rough process.”

She first drew with a pen, but after a few days, opted for the pencil. “It’s easier to do with a pencil,” she says. “Even though I wasn’t trying to make it into a perfect thing. I could erase pencil, and ink is not erasable, and I didn’t have any Wite-Out with me.”

Although Davis’s cycling journey takes place in the spring several years ago, her descriptions of nature and the nature of the trip itself have that end-of-summer feeling to them that make you want to grab a bike and go.

Davis’ graphic novel also hits at many thoughts and doubts all of us who love cycling have: What does it feel like to face a never-ending road up a mountain? What does it mean to bike alone in America, especially for a woman? What does it feel like when cars drive by at high speed? What do you need to consider when looking for a safe place to rest, or even pitch a tent, away from curious eyes? And what does it mean to choose a bicycle over the convenience of a car? ◀