Market Day
Writer/Artist - James Sturm
Publisher - Drawn & Quarterly $21.95 USD
A fable set in the early 1900s in an Eastern Europe shtetl, Market Day finds rugmaker Mendleman taking his finely crafted rugs by donkey to market. Though still a young man, he has settled into a comfortable artisanal routine: Observe nature and draw ideas for rugs from it; make rugs in solitude and without interference, with personal expression and high quality the main goals; sell the rugs on Market Day to your appreciative patron, Finkler. But because comfortable routines don’t make for good stories, it’s obvious from the moment Mendleman leaves his house that something is going to be different about this Market Day.
The day begins well enough. Although his ruminations on the trip to market are fraught with anxiety over providing for his wife and child and what horrors might befall them if he wasn’t around, once Mendleman gets to town he is nearly intoxicated by the sights, sounds and smells of the market after his period of solitary labor. It’s obvious that the camaraderie and easy good humor Mendleman enters into with two fellow artisans is one of his favorite parts of Market Day, the timeless bullshitting and ball-busting men experience with each other part of the familiar ritual that leads them to their patron, Finkler, who sells only the highest quality wares and who has pushed the young rugmaker to raise his level of quality in order to be saleable. Mendleman has, then, come to think of Finkler not merely as his customer but as a combination of boss and father figure: he needs to please the man to make money for his family (moreso now that his wife is due to give birth any day now), but he also wants to please him. So when he and his comrades find that Finkler has suddenly and mysteriously sold the business to a young relative and left town, Mendleman feels not just his work routine broken but a deep loss. Sturm spends the rest of the book following Mendleman’s crisis. The proud refusal to sell cheap to the new purveyor is fine for his friends, but he can’t afford to make that choice, and so we witness his desperate journey to sell his merchandise to whoever will pay for it and at a fraction of what he had expected to get when the day began. Again he finds comfort and camaraderie with other men, commiserating over their lots and getting drunk, another timeless ritual, before he eventually must make his way home.
I didn’t mean to summarize so many of the plot points, but I honestly was enjoying spending some more time with the book. There is a meditative, calming quality to a period story like this, spare in text and paced with Old World tempo of footsteps and the creak of the donkey cart. Sturm is very good at slowing the reader down with panels rich in texture to take in. He draws vistas with thick lines and minimal clutter a la Seth, when it suits the story to do so, gets more detailed to indicate the varied activities of the crowd, and always spots his blacks extremely well to convey the seriousness of Mendleman’s situation, the darkness of his mental state.
Color is now a part of Sturm’s toolkit, earth tones naturally dominant, given the setting, the browns and olive changing to yellow variants to heighten physical action or express a moment of hope or the kindness of a stranger. Sturm shows little sympathy for the merchants, but the working men on the street are the salt of the Earth and have to stick together.
I was surprised to learn that Market Day began in Sturm’s mind as a children’s book, given how bleak and hopeless it seems. The ambiguous ending suggests Mendleman may sell his loom and abandon his art entirely, but a second reading, and careful study of the brighter colors suggests that after a night to sleep on it, he may rebound, maybe a little less naive. I guess I have to give Sturm credit for not being too obvious about it, but on the other hand, the book was depressing enough on the first read that I was reluctant to give it another go.
Although camaraderie among men is a common theme in Sturm’s work, so is religion, and so it was unusually absent here, although it’s quite possible that that was Sturm’s intention. When Mendleman exits his home, the mezuza swings from the motion of the door, a possible suggestion that God is involved and maybe testing Mendleman, or alternately, that once Mendleman left the house, he left behind God’s protection. Either way, Mendleman gives little thought to God, even when he meets the rabbi, and when he is at his lowest, he doesn’t blame God, although he does seek guidance from another source, a fortune-teller. Perhaps this is another sign of how lost he is.
Beyond the pleasures of trying to root out symbols and religious themes, there are enough good things here (great drawing, sensitive coloring, tension, unusual setting, well-placed humor to make Mendleman more accessible) that the following may be nitpicking. However, I was a little confused by some of the choices, such as Mendleman picturing sperm surrounding an egg, or his medical journal-style imagining of his own full bladder—would a common man in those days have known what these things looked like? Likewise, although his speech is simple, in Mendlebaum’s narration he uses words like “furtively” and “respite” that seem too educated for a rural artisan. If Sturm was Mendleman, and certainly there are some parallels for an artist bringing his new book to market, I as Finkler might have told him to take some of the fancy, distracting threads out of his rug. But these are minor blemishes on what is otherwise an impressive, involving work made with great care.
—Christopher Allen
