Scalawag completes the "Bughouse" trilogy, a story of jazz musicians with the Kafka-esque touch of anthropomorphic insects, and it's as much an enjoyable read as the previous two books. Scalawag follows pretty directly on the heels of Baja, and it's been a while since I last read the book, so I didn't immediately cotton to some of the continuing subplots, but the general approach of the story, and its examination of drug use, womanizing and the love of music amongst the jazz musicians, is clear throughout. Though the Bughouse trilogy has been focused on the band named Bughouse and has featured a group of characters, each volume also focuses most clearly on one character or member of the band, and in the case of Scalawag, that focus is on Dennis, the new piano player for the band. Dennis starts out looking like a straight arrow, but we soon find out that he has some of the same appetites as the rest, as well as a history that piece by piece begins to haunt Dennis and then his bandmates as a result.
Each volume of Bughouse is recognizable as part of a series thanks to its examination of jazz music (and musicians), but each volume has been quite different as well. Bughouse, as Lafler's introduction to the world, was more of an ensemble piece and a general look at the life of a jazz band on the rise. Baja featured a love letter of sorts to Mexico and an examination of the middling days of a successful band, when some of the members take a break and there's almost inevitably some sort of tragedy or crisis that challenges the band. Scalawag is about a band that has made it, and how they deal with those crises when they come along. That includes, in this story, a new band member and the realization of one of the band members that he needs to get his life back on track and return to the band.
While the casual use of insects instead of people gives Scalawag part of its surreal style, there's certainly more of a surreal touch at work in the storytelling than that. One of Lafler's plots in Scalawag focuses in on an underground cartoonist in the Robert Crumb vein, and then gives him a financial background and unusual method of cartooning that is unexpected, funny and decidedly weird. Lafler also lets his characters venture off into chemically-induced fantasy sequences such that the reader isn't always certain what is really happening and what is just happening in the characters' heads. It all becomes clear by the end, but there's something disconcerting (and yet engaging) about the fluid relationship between reality and fantasy in Lafler's writing.
Scalawag is a tricky business, being a graphic novel about music, something that is damn near impossible to replicate in comic book form. However, Lafler really conveys the joy of jazz and improvisation, the feelings of the music and the demons that often drove it, by giving us such memorable characters that make up the Bughouse band. Scalawag is in large part a meditation on the flaws of a musician, whether it be womanizing, gambling, drinking, drug use or just the focus on the importance of music instead of the things that society generally tells us is important, like commitment and steady work. However, in focusing on some of the foibles of musicians, he also conveys the joy and free spirited nature that makes them so artistic, and captures a joy of music that extends beyond character flaws and in some ways redeems his characters.
In Scalawag, Lafler has concocted a solid finale to his Bughouse trilogy that is also a pretty good standalone read and open-ended enough that he could return to his world of bughead jazz later down the road if he wanted to. The Bughouse trilogy now stands as the examination of the rise and potential fall of a jazz band, but it steers clear of a lot of the cliches of rise and fall music stories, in no small measure because of the application of surreal touches but also because of Lafler's storytelling sense, which is difficult to predict but always interesting to follow.
