Drafted by Rick Parker

I've grumbled here, a few times, about the ways comics memoirs get pushed to be "bigger." The market - or maybe just editors - want stories to be Important, to be Resonant, to be Striking. And creators, wanting to tell their stories, often bend to that market in one way or another.

But most lives aren't that big. What's interesting about them is the succession of small moments, the choice of paths, what it meant to the person at the time. Keeping that focus, and being both honest and interesting, can be tricky.

Rick Parker walks that tightrope with his memoir Drafted. There's material that lets the publisher (Abrams) be a bit expansive in their marketing copy: Parker was drafted in 1966, during the Vietnam era. As it happened, he never went overseas, but he didn't know that's how it would be at the time. And he's telling this in order, so on every page we only know what Parker knew at the time.

This was a brand-new book in 2024, so it's clearly Parker looking back a long ways. He wrote and drew this in his seventies, telling the story of himself at the ages of eighteen to about twenty-one. (To put it into personal perspective, Parker's entire military service happened up to about six months before I was born, and I am by no means a young man.)

It's a straightforward, crisply-told book. The young Parker was a bit naïve and sheltered - or, at least, older Parker presents his younger self that way - and there are multiple scenes where I wondered if young Parker didn't realize what other people were hinting about at the time, and Parker-the-creator resolutely doesn't explain or add context in retrospect. (In particular, on the day he musters out, there's a long, weird interaction with a fellow soldier and his wife that could have been a backhanded attempt at a threesome or a clumsy badger game - I'm not sure which, but young Parker doesn't seem to see either possibility, and Parker-the-narrator doesn't comment, either.)

Parker runs through those three years in the US Army chronologically, with a brief prologue about his childhood and seven numbered chapters for the major phases of his military career. He goes through basic, gets trained to drive a tank, is approved for Officer Candidate School and passes that, is commissioned as a first lieutenant and assigned to a missile program in the New Mexico desert, and does a few other odd assignments during his enlistment. It's all carefully observed, narrated with a lot of captions mostly in a factual vein, and in a precise, meat-and-potatoes style for both art and writing. Parker isn't trying to be fancy here, despite his long career as a fine artist. This is the clear story of what happened to him, with both the boring and unpleasant parts kept in for maximum transparency.

Drafted isn't quite what I expected, but it does exactly what it sets out to do, does it comprehensively, and tells a story that's both particular and general - Parker was one of more than two million draftees during the Vietnam era, so a lot of elements of his story will be familiar to many of those vets, and of interest to later vets and others.