Leela Corman’s graphic novel Victory Parade is a powerful and affecting portrait of trauma set in World War II Brooklyn.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Corman’s figures are striking…Vivid watercolors enhance the uncanny atmosphere, hues spilling and pooling into visceral shapes and strata…Savage and soulful.”
In her own words, here is Leela Corman’s Book Notes music playlist for her graphic novel novel Victory Parade:
I had the initial idea for my most recent graphic novel Victory Parade in 2013, and began work on it in November of 2016, immediately after the US presidential elections. In the stunned aftermath, I decided that this was the form of antifascist activism I could engage in: a book depicting the inevitable end result of dehumanization. People who tell stories about the past often say that their work is really about their current time. That’s true of my work. I felt that by delving into my own culture’s history, I was carrying my assigned corner of humanity’s coffin. I spent a lot of time in archives of some of the worst things people have inflicted on each other. I found an uncle’s name in the Majdanek records. Reports began to surface of children being separated from their parents and put in cages on the US-Mexico border. Nazi and white supremacist fliers appeared on the college campus where I taught, while colleagues wrinkled their noses disapprovingly at “Antifa”, for not being “nice”. I spent my days in the back corner of my friend’s bookstore cafe, reading Studs Terkel’s 1985 collection of WWII oral histories, The Good War, and watching US Army film unit footage of Dachau and Buchenwald of severed heads and organs in jars, and mass graves full of blood leaking into the mud. And then I began to actually draw and paint the book. Long books take me a while. I spent the pandemic lockdown meticulously painting piles of corpses with a #00 round. I didn’t think the work was taking a toll on me, but my family begged to differ. Between the 2020 election and the inauguration in 2021, when it wasn’t at all clear that a fascist takeover would be avoided, I felt like my intellect was under assault. I instituted a practice of putting my brushes down at 6pm every day, dimming the lights in my studio, putting on some immersive music at high volume, and reading precisely two pages of Johannes Itten’s Treatise On Color Theory. Still the work continued. I worked on this book at every residency I went to between 2018 and 2022. You’d think that I’d have listened to a lot of period music, but I really didn’t, despite having a soft spot for it. The only antidote to the dark cloud I was perpetually in while I worked on this book was intense, sometimes crushing, noise-rock and drone. The following is a list of music I listened to frequently while working on Victory Parade, that kept me sane in an almost physical way while making a book about individuals processing collective trauma, while being an individual processing multiple collective traumas. It’s only a partial list, like all lists. There’s so much else I could have included. That’s great because this is book 2 of a trilogy.
Einsturzende Neubauten – “Achterland”
This track is on the album “Lament”, a work that is extremely significant to everything I have made since 2015, and especially to this book. It’s deep in the DNA of Victory Parade. A multidisciplinary, fully-realized work of history-based art, where research turns to transcendent mourning and noise. If I ever make anything half as powerful as this, I’ll die happy. This track is a performance of a work by a Belgian poet and WWI veteran named Paul van den Broeck. It’s a corrosive meditation on trench warfare. To me, it feels like the sonic sibling to another work of art that is deep in my book’s DNA, Otto Dix’s monumental painting “Triptychon Der Krieg”, a depiction of trench warfare in the style of a medieval altarpiece. I kept a print of it over my drafting table for the entire time I worked on Victory Parade. Likewise, this track stayed with me as I painted, hissing its fumes into each panel.
“Zeg het niet Zeg het niet Zeg het niet Zeg het niet
Don’t say it Don’t say it Don’t say it Don’t say it
Halve rust betekent:
Half rest means:
ontluizen!
Delouse!”
Thurston Moore – “Alice Moki Jayne”
This instrumental became my literal sound therapy from the first time I heard it, while on a plane to my ancestral country of Poland for the very first time. In 2020, sometimes I had to lie down and listen to it in order to calm my clanging nervous system. I was lucky enough to see him perform it live in New York in 2019 with his incredible band. It’s unreal how beautiful it is. I feel so much gratitude to him for writing it.
Come – “Off To One Side”
Come are my favorite American band. I saw them every chance I got when I was an art student in Boston in the 1990s, and again in recent years when they’ve played reunion shows. They’re probably responsible for a significant amount of the ringing in my ears, and I’m not complaining. I somehow forgot about them for a little while, though, in my years of hustling, trying to be an adult, and getting into other kinds of music. In 2016 I found myself coming back to the postpunk subculture that raised me, and it wasn’t long before I went in search of them again. This is the first song of theirs I ever heard, on a live radio performance on WMBR, in 1992 or so. Those first call-and-response slides immediately made me tear up. They still do. And then there’s that brief in-breath, before the wall of guitars crashes down, and Thalia Zedek’s unparalleled voice cuts through it. I could keep going with this dry description, but honestly, this song always flattens me. I can’t believe my ears when I hear it.
Chris Brokaw – “Depending”
Beginning in week one of lockdown, Brokaw started doing streaming performances from his basement. They kept me sane. This album, “Puritan”, came out in 2021 and was an instant favorite of mine. This song is a story of regret and acceptance. Someone’s leaving and they know they’re not coming back. It’s pain and it’s peace. What else could 2021 have possibly sounded like?
Live Skull – “Raise The Manifestation”
This song is a cathedral. Another one I can’t believe exists. I feel like anyone who hears it should prostrate themselves before it. Dire lyrics that seem to be about the late 1980s New York they arose from, delivered by Marnie Jaffe in what someone once called her “stern wail”, over a perfect crystalline structure of bleak, majestic dual guitars and that devastatingly precise rhythm section. Another song I’m describing in dry terms, but it’s unbelievable.
The Birthday Party – “The Friend Catcher”
I needed a lot of Rowland S. Howard’s ice-sheet guitar around me while I was meticulously painting piles of corpses with a #00 round.
Cherubs – “Monkey Chow Mein”
A perfect cinderblock of a song, with a lilting melody entombed in it somewhere. A favorite weight lifting song. Lifting weights is my actual therapy.
Rowland S. Howard – “Silver Chain”
You know who you are, and you know why I’m telling you to go fuck yourself. This song was too beautiful to be given to any of us.
Popol Vuh – Aguirre
This is the soundtrack to one of my favorite Werner Herzog films, “Aguirre, The Wrath Of God”. It’s beautiful and so dire. I blasted this album constantly during one residency, when I was lost in painting some of the most intense imagery in the book.
Glenn Branca – Symphony No. 1
It’s a scrub brush to the brain. I could go on about how I’m obsessed with the late ’70s/early ’80s New York underground, and with the No Wave scene in particular, but really it’s just a scrub brush to the brain. I was too little to know about that scene at the time, but I came of age in the same place, and a few years later the music that grew out of it became my formative sound. So sometimes I need to go back to the source and get a dose of that stuff.
Mars – “3E”
And sometimes I need a dose of the even scuzzier stuff, some neurotic gutter noise made by people who read a lot.
Crime And The City Solution – “I Have The Gun”
The person who first played me this song knew exactly what they were doing, and now I listen to it when I need to feel comforted.
Thalia Zedek Band – “Begin To Exhume”
A furious missive from the America we live in now, where we know what is being done in our name. An indictment. That voice. No one can hide.
Thurston Moore – “Exalted”
This is quite simply one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard, and sometimes I need beauty to come over, sweep me off my feet, and make out with me. I often forget to give myself beauty when I’m working. This album came out just when I was starting to paint the book, and I needed it and still do.
Codeine – “Pickup Song”
I’m listening to this right now, because I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. It’s snowing today; I spent a month in the woods at a residency working on this book in the winter, midway through the process, and listened to this album, Frigid Stars, all the time. This song isn’t about the feeling you get from loving the wrong person, it IS that feeling, and I want to put that in all my books.
Einstuzende Neubauten – “Headcleaner”
This noise symphony in multiple movements has been my studio accompaniment since this album, “Tabula Rasa”, came out. I was twenty years old, going through my first breakup, living in an attic in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I took myself to see them on that tour. I was lucky to find a place at the lip of the stage, off to the side to avoid flying feet in the pit. Blixa Bargeld’s performance that night was a lesson in disciplined creation. The entire band’s performance shaped the course of my artistic life. I still think about it every day. As for this specific song, it is a marshaling of forces, a great historical statement, a blast that clears something out of the landscape and makes room for other things. Again I am resorting to language to describe experience that includes but extends beyond language.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Leela Corman’s playlist for her graphic novel Unterzakhn
Leela Corman is a painter, educator, and graphic-novel creator, working in the realm of diaspora Ashkenazi culture and third-generation restorative work. Her books include Unterzakhn, which was nominated for an Eisner Award, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Le Prix Artémisia; won the 2015 Romics Prize for Best Anglo-American Comic; and received a 2023 MoCCA Arts Festival Award of Excellence, and the short comics collections You Are Not a Guest and We All Wish for Deadly Force. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The Believer, Nautilus, and The Nib. She is a founding instructor at Sequential Artists Workshop and an instructor at Rhode Island School of Design.