A Sketchy Guy

At first glance, the premise of cartoonist and author Ted Rall’s autobiographical graphic novel The Year of Loving Dangerously reads like pure porno fantasy. After being kicked out of Columbia University, dumped by his girlfriend and fired from his job all in a matter of weeks, a broke and homeless Rall found a creative way to ensure a roof over his head throughout the summer of 1984: bedding a bevy of Manhattan women. Actually making it work proved a complicated mixture of carnal delights and desperation.

Indeed, Rall cites a bit of both when asked about the origin of the book, which he wrote and fellow graphic novelist Pablo G. Callejo illustrated. A more explicitly personal work than his other books—which include the Orwell parody 2024:A Graphic Novel and Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?—Rall wanted to offer a corrective to certain other autobiographical graphic novels, which he believes offer a depressing and inaccurate picture of their authors’ lives.

“To read a lot of ‘autobio’ comics, you would get the impression that most cartoonists just sit around at home and are lonely, sexless, dull, bland people,” Rall says.“And that’s not really true. I have lots of friends who are cartoonists who have pretty amazingly active lives in every way. I thought that it’s ridiculous that these books should be so boring.”

Rall also wanted to inject some added virility to another field that The Year of Loving Dangerously fits into, what he deems “the male slut genre.” Leafing through one such memoir by a self-anointed Casanova, Rall remembers balking when its author boastfully claimed to have slept with three women in one year.

“Big fucking deal!” Rall says with a laugh. “Or, in this case, big non-fucking deal.There were nights that I slept with three women.”

As The Year of Loving Dangerously consistently reminds us, however, Rall’s erotic exploits found their origins less in bacchanalian vigor than basic survival. Many of the book’s most memorable passages consider the ambiguous intersections between sexual desire and economic destitution, albeit with Rall’s characteristic blunt wit. (“Would I have fucked Melissa three times before going to sleep had I not wanted her to consider inviting me back?” Rall ponders post-coitus. “Would I have gone down on her as enthusiastically?”) This warping effect that fiscal anxiety has upon personal relationships comes with some historical specificity. Reagan posters litter Rall’s Manhattan, smiling talismans of the era’s hyper-individualism and go-go greed. In the face of the current recession, however, Rall felt that his fall from middle-class security to impoverishment would resonate with contemporary readers.

“I thought, ‘If this could happen to me, it could happen to anyone,’” Rall says. “I viewed that as a personal indictment of capitalism, or at least the particular variety that we have in the United States at this time.”

If The Year of Loving Dangerously takes a jaundiced view of 1980s-era economic disparity, it also overflows with loving period detail: graffiti-streaked subway car interiors; posters for a Dead Kennedys show at The World; movie marquees trumpeting Amadeus, Broad way Danny Rose and The Terminator.

Having seen the fascination that the decade elicits from his younger friends, Rall felt a responsibility to re-create the Manhattan of 1984 in as exacting a manner as he could. Often, this meant going through Callejo’s illustrations inch by inch in search of inaccuracies.

“We had lots of discussions like: ‘No no, there were no Village Voice boxes on the street.They sold it at the newsstands at the time,’” Rall says, “or ‘The streetlights didn’t use white bulbs.They used yellow bulbs, so make sure the lighting reflects that.’” The occasional anachronism notwithstanding, Rall offered unconditional praise for Callejo, his first major collaborator.That their correspondences consisted entirely of emails and phone calls throughout the three-year process that began in 2006 (Rall lives on Long Island, while Callejo lives in Spain) made Rall all the more impressed with how their work fell into synch, and how much richer the end result became.

“Let’s face it: No one is going to want to look at my drawings of me having sex with highly abstracted, geometric women,” Rall says of his own distinctive drawing technique.“Pablo has a very sensual, almost storyboard-y style and it works. I love it.”

Rall recognizes that for every reader who sympathizes with his dire situation, there will be another who views his bedhopping as a mark of an exploitative cad. For him, both opinions are valid.

“The tone I was going for was like a guy at a bar who is drunk enough to say, ‘Look, I’m just going to lay it out there,’” Rall says. “‘You can judge me or not.This is what happened.’”