For this first Commentary of 2012 I’m quite delighted to be welcoming to the blog a writer who may be making her graphic novel debut but who is certainly no stranger to other forms of writing and certainly intimately familiar with the lovely world of literature. Please welcome Doctor Mary Talbot who tells us about one of the books that has been on my Must Read radar for several month, ever since her husband and collaborator on the book, Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, was kind enough to show me some pages last year. I know quite a few of you are also looking forward to reading Dotter, which is published by Cape at the start of February, so without further ado I will hand over to Mary and Bryan to tell us more about what promises to be an unusual and fascinating work combining biographical elements, literature, gender, history, society and more:

Dotter of her Father’s Eyes presents two coming-of-age stories, taking place at different points in the twentieth century. By intertwining these stories, I explore aspects of social history:  gender politics and social expectations, shifting notions about ‘acceptable’ behaviour.

The idea for the book started when I took early retirement, giving me more time to write. Bryan suggested I try my hand at autobiographical writing, producing a graphic novel script that he would illustrate. Some previous plans of his for a collaboration had sadly fallen through, with the untimely death of the Australian narrative poet, Dorothy Porter. He suggested a couple of draft titles: ‘James Joyce and Me’ and ‘What a Piece of Work’ (actually the title of one of Porter’s books). To be honest, I was a bit bemused at the prospect of autobiography. ‘Whoever would want to know?’ I thought, ‘So, my father was a Joycean scholar, so what?’ I gave it some thought anyway and, vaguely aware that Joyce had a daughter, I looked into that as a possible angle. As it happened a biography of Lucia Joyce had come out not long before (Carol Shloss’s Lucia Joyce: To Dance at the Wake, published Farrar Straus Giroux). I was blown away by the tragedy of Lucia’s story – that was what I was interested in writing about. It’s that biography that I’m reading in this train journey scene, part of the opening sequence:

As you can see, there’s a transition from present to remembered past. I love the colour/sepia contrast. In the script the description for the bottom panel was just something like ‘heap of boys playfighting’. Bryan introduced the small girl watching them. It improves the character focus a lot. He did that with quite a few panels – adding the young me as the viewing subject.

I really enjoyed evoking life in northwest England in the 1950s and 60s. I wanted to bring out how different it was, how much has changed. Television was still quite a novelty; not many homes had one. I nearly included my first experience of the moving image at age five: traumatised by going to see Bambi! It didn’t fit in, though. Shame.

The nuances of class differences were something else I wanted to evoke. Those fine distinctions, between people living in the same neighbourhood, must totally mystify outsiders: taste in interior décor, eating habits, the presence of books.

We added a few footnote comments. The first of them is on this page. I wasn’t keen on the way Bryan had drawn my mother – in an apron as worn by the stereotypical 1950s American housewife! So we made a joke of it. I like the way it highlights the collaboration and adds an element of meta-textual commentary.

Gender politics is a key concern of the book. In the two storylines – Lucia’s and my own – I show how gender expectations constrain girls and women. Lucia matures to become an accomplished performer of modern dance. This makes her altogether too modern for her mother, who dislikes her aspirations for a professional life and frequently belittles them. Father and daughter are closer, but he is apparently oblivious to her plans. The consequences for Lucia are tragic. In my case, the fact that boys and girls are supposed to be and do different things was first forced on me when I started school. This is what we’ve represented on Page 17 here:

It’s odd – I used to use this scenario in seminars, talking about gender segregation with students (I taught on gender and language for decades). I could have done with this page as a visual aid! At the school I went to, difference was quite literally inscribed in stone.

Bryan and I both grew up in Lancashire – Wigan, to be precise – and my schooling was Catholic. A distinctive feature of that particular cultural milieu in the 1950s and 60s was the annual ‘Walking Day’, as represented on Page 22. Here’s also some of the visual reference Bryan was drawing on to produce the page:

After scrounging old photo albums from my family, I scanned quantities of pictures that Bryan then made selections from. The collage of photo fragments is what he worked from at the drawing board.

Bryan was making scripting suggestions from the start, but it was once he started bringing the script to life on the page that his enrichment of the story really started to shine though. The staircase page is a fine example of how his visualisations went beyond my expectations. It’s a lovely piece of design, while telling the story beautifully.

I had a lot of fun researching les années folles in 1920s Paris. Lucia and her family were right there in the thick of things, living in the centre of Paris. The place must have been positively thrumming with creative activity. Lucia developed a passion for modern, expressive dancing, eventually performing it herself. One of her teachers was Margaret Morris (a pioneer of dance as therapy and still a big name today). She became something of a role model. The page below shows Lucia seeing her dance for the first time:

Lucia’s tragic story must have been getting to me, because I actually dreamed this image! What astonished me was that Bryan actually drew it, on the basis of my two or three line description (and a certain amount of arm waving).

There’s a mass of biographical material available on James Joyce and his family, but there isn’t that much directly about Lucia, apart from the biography by Shloss I’ve mentioned. I needed to maintain focus on Lucia not her father or others in the family. They were such a dysfunctional family, it was hard not to get sidetracked. Then I had decisions about how much to include on Lucia’s mental illness, incarcerations and treatments. Eventually I decided to represent them over just a few pages, as a single cataclysmic event.

Bryan adds:

I developed a style that I thought suited the material and the artwork is coded so that the reader is in no doubt as to which thread they are reading. The few present-day sequences are drawn in clear line style with flat colours. The autobiographical sequences are in soft B pencil and watercolour wash on textured watercolour paper, with touches of spot colour. In Photoshop, I made the washes sepia and the paper pale yellow. The Joyce family sequences are inked with a dip pen and shaded with a watercolour wash, tinted blue in Photoshop, on smooth paper. I used spot colour in Mary’s sections to approximate the way that memory renders some things more vivid that others.

I had to do a lot of research in order to evoke the atmosphere of Paris of the 20s and 30s, and Lancashire in the 50s and 60s. I also, of course, could draw on my own memories of Wigan and of Mary’s family home.

Regarding Page 37, mentioned by Mary above, the staircase was based on one I’d seen recently inside the Courtauld Institute of Art, where I’d attended an academic conference on comics.

Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary and Bryan Talbot is published in February by Jonathan Cape (UK) and Dark Horse (US). FPI would like to thank Mary and Bryan for kindly taking the time to tell us more about the book; you can also learn more from Mary’s own site here and Bryan’s site here. Mary was also kind enough to share some of her favourite works of 2011 recently in our annual guest Best of the Year posts, you can see what graphic novels, books and films took her fancy here. Mary and Bryan will be doing a signing in London’s fine Orbital Comics on February 3rd at 5pm and Orbital is also hosting an art exhibition from the book from February 2nd to March 2nd.

By Robert Sellers and JAKe

SelfMadeHero

“The story of four of the greatest boozers of all time: Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed. Robert Sellers and Jake seamlessly weave their four stories into one fast-paced adventure of drunken binges, orgies, parties and fun.

Told through the eyes of an everyman, Martin, we begin our tale in a typical London boozer at Christmas time. Martin sits alone at the end of the bar, drinking himself into oblivion. At the other end of the bar sit our four hellraisers. In turn, Richard Burton, then Richard Harris, then Oliver Reed and finally Peter O’Toole take this disillusioned soul on a personal tour of their lives: their tumultuous childhoods, rise to stardom and chaotic personal lives.“

Hellraisers is deliberately set up to be a boozer’s Christmas Carol, with a famous foursome taking turns a telling their life stories to a hellraiser in waiting.

So what you get is what you expect; a collection of the finest anecdotes of the lives (and deaths) of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Oliver Reed and Peter O’Toole (yes, O’Toole’s still with us, so what – he certainly counts is the reason for his inclusion). There they are, young and vibrant above on the cover and older, yet probably not that much wiser below from the end of the book….

The graphic novel is a reworking of Sellars’ Hellraisers book, one I have no prior knowledge of, but you don’t really need it, as the stories of these four famous boozers are ever so familiar, such well known things, I’ll warrant all of us will be able to trot out many of the tales of boozed up bad behaviour, the parties, the binging, the women.

Here, from what I gather, Sellers has adapted it from a straight procession of anecdotes in the prose to this new story, employing the simple and familiar Christmas Carol structure. The adaptation works, indeed I’d imagine it’s better than the prose. But so much of that is down to the artwork by curiously capitalised artist JAKe, with a line and style well suited to the frequent and all-important caricatures of a procession of famous figures populating the lives of the boozy four.

Bogart, Bacall, Eastwood, Marvin, Mitchum, Taylor, Moon, Hepburn….. you name them, these men knew, drank with, slept with, married or offended them…. and JAKe does a grand job of making them all recognisable pretty much immediately.

But there’s much more than straight caricature here, and JAKe’s more than capable of turning in everything from cartoonish farce all the way to the darkest times of all of the actors in question. And oh, boy, are there dark times to cover here.

But we don’t, not really. The dark times are mentioned, but Sellers is mostly about the legends, emphasising the exuberance, the naughtiness, the loveable booze-addled luvvies side of things in Hellraisers. And yes, there’s much to enjoy when we look back on the lives of the men here, because they elevated the act of boozing into an artform, and did so with such unapologetic vigour.

So pretty much all the way through, even when Sellers focuses on the darker times, you know there’s a light anecdote to temper the darkness just around the corner, just over the page. And that’s a shame, because the most powerful moments, and the most interesting, come when we get a moment of near clarity, and the remorse and regret threatens to come to the surface. But then it’s shut off again, and we’re back with the adorable cartoon drunks, a loveable group of lushes, brilliant actors with a passion for life:

The big, big problem with the book is it doesn’t really know what the hell it’s meant to be doing with wannabe Hellraiser Martin. His role essentially is to be the sounding board and guide to our boozers, as they recount the moments of their lives. But he’s also meant to be the Scrooge of the tale, being taught the error of his ways by the four Hellraisers. Except they’re practically without remorse or regret.

It’s a disparity that would seem at the heart of the book. But it’s not, as the heart of the book isn’t the journey of Martin, that’s merely the means to tell the story. The heart of the book is a simple one, it’s Sellers spinning the anecdotes, reinforcing the legends. On the back of the book we’re told that this is a graphic account of four very cautionary tales. But Sellers isn’t telling a cautionary tale at all, he’s telling the old fashioned celebratory stories that have always been told of these men. It’s enjoyable of course, these were unique individuals at the very least, but don’t go looking for anything more serious than that.

(a page from Trains Are Mint #7 by and (c) Oliver East)

what have I become?
my sweetest friend
everyone I know
goes away in the end

and you could have it all
my empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

(Hurt by Trent Reznor, but made perfect by Johnny Cash)

I’ve just finished Reinhard Kleist’s wonderful graphic biography of Johnny Cash – I See A Darkness and have to say it’s every bit as good as Joe said in his review last week. In fact, Joe did such a good job of reviewing it that I’m not even going to try.

Here’s some of what Joe had to say:

Anyone who’s listened to Cash’s music over the years knows his songs came out of his life; the darkness and the light were both there, he lived through them, he pretty much lived his songs. And that’s part of the point Kleist makes here, how so many people … bought into Cash because his singing is honest; you feel the raw emotion in his voice, in the early work and even in the final years.

Its a wonderful read; in fact I found after I’d finish I had to go back and re-read it more slowly and enjoyed it even more on the second reading and I know its going to be one of those special books that I go back to every so often and read once more. Its a story of a 20th century icon, a man who bestrode pretty much all normal boundaries of genre to appeal to a far wider audience and a remarkable life….. But mostly its about a man, the darkness he sees around him that almost swallows him and the lights that lead him back out the edge of the darkness (although he’d never be completely free of it), the love of his mother, his lost brother, June.

All I can say is that I agree with him completely. I See A Darkness has a wonderfully true feel -  this feels like Johnny Cash’s life, every dark moment, every song, every emotion. It”s a great read.

I’d add just one thing to Joe’s review – take a little time with this and soundtrack it – set up a playlist, get all those classic Cash songs on and you’ll realise just how well Kleist captures the essence of Johnny Cash. And be sure to end the soundtrack as Kleist ends his book; with Cash’s American Recordings work with Rick Rubin. End it with Cash’s voice, cracking and fragile singing his version of Hurt. Tears should flow.

Reinhard Kleist will be at the Comica festival on Sunday 22nd November in conversation with Charles Shaar Murray.

Reinhard Kleist

Self Made Hero

“If you wanna save your soul from hell, cowboy, then change your ways today. Or you’ll ride with us through these endless skies, forever on the hunt for the Devil’s herd...” Ghost Riders in the Sky

To say award-winning German comics creator Reinhard Kleist’s graphic biography of the late, great Johnny Cash arrived with a fair weight of expectation – mixed with anticipation – on my part is an understatement. Those of you who’ve been reading the blog for a good while may recall that we first talked about this work nearly two years ago when the original made a big splash in Germany. In fact it sold out its original print run from Carlsen and among the awards it picked up was the prestigious Max und Moritz, before going on to be picked up and translated into other languages by publishers like Dargaud in France and an English language version was apparently on the cards from Dark Horse. Since many of us were eager to read it in English we were pretty happy at this, but then it went quiet and seemed to vanish off the radar until Blighty’s Self Made Hero stepped forward. Home of the Manga Shakespeare and some fine literary adaptations we’ve been very much enjoying this seemed like quite a departure for them. Was it worth the wait? Was it worth the effort? Oh yeah. It was.

(The Cash family, including young Johnny, singing in the cotton fields)

Anyone who’s listened to Cash’s music over the years knows his songs came out of his life; the darkness and the light were both there, he lived through them, he pretty much lived his songs. And that’s part of the point Kleist makes here, how so many people (including people like me who’d normally run a mile from anything remotely labelled C&W) bought into Cash because his singing is honest; you feel the raw emotion in his voice, in the early work and even in the final years (his cover of Hurt is immensely raw and powerful, for example, it could have been made for him to sing at that age in his life).

But since Cash’s songs often deal with loss and the struggles against the forces that can all too easily grind us all down in everyday life, living those songs means he himself never had an easy life and Kleist selects segments of Johnny’s life, from the childhood days on their New Deal sponsored cotton farm, struggling to fight their way out of the Depression, singing to keep up their spirits during back-breaking labour, marrying too young, his self destructive, amphetamine and booze fuelled behaviour touring on the road as his success grew, the love between Johnny and June Carter, the famous music gig at Folsom Prison.

(Folsom Prison; no fancy sets or theatre, just Johnny, June and the boys in the band in front of hundreds of hardened prison inmates; a gig that’s passed into musical legend)

Its a long work as comics go, over 200 pages, but even so there is no way it can pack in as much in depth detail as a prose biography and Kleist wisely avoids the temptation to simply jam in as much of Johnny’s life as he can. Instead he opts for a roughly chronological approach which takes in elements of the life that shaped Cash and his music, interspersed with comics interpretations of of some of his songs. In fact the book itself opens with one of these songs being acted out – almost the equivalent of the dream sequence in a movie, where the protagonist drives a car with number plates reading ‘HELL’ through the streets of a gambling city where he “shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.” While some of the song sequences have a slightly different style about them Kleist keeps the differences in style mostly small so on a first reading it isn’t always obvious you’re in a song/dream segment and not an actual ‘proper’ biographical chapter, until the penny drops and you realise this is based on one of Cash’s songs.

At first I thought this was a bit of a failing on the artist’s part, not more clearly differentiating between biographical and song-based chapters. But as I was drawn further and further into the book I changed my mind and decided that this was actually a good decision on Kleist’s part; as I said earlier you can’t really separate the man and his music; he sang life as he saw it and lived it, they were part of him and he’s in each of them, so although the song chapters are a sort of fantasy they are also, in their own fashion, biographical.

The art through most of the book, both the biographical and the interpretations of the songs, is mostly in a suitably moody black and white with some gray tones for effect, although occasionally for the songs Kleist uses a more cartoony style (such as he uses for ‘A Boy Name Sue’). There are a couple of distinctive exceptions to this, however, a section where June and his mother try to help Johnny kick his dependence on drugs that’s leading him down a dark highway, executed in negative: white lines on a black background, an eerie sight of a human nervous system arced in pain, a glowing ball emerging from within, darkness and light, black and white, drugs dependency and love all warring within his body in a couple of wordless but very powerful pages. A song segment for The Ballad of Ira Hayes is again in a totally different style, much more symbolic and cartoony but equally powerful and, given the contrast they make with the principally more regular style through the rest of the book their impact is much stronger.

“Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won’t answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinkin’ Indian
Nor the Marine that went to war

There they battled up Iwo Jima’s hill,
Two hundred and fifty men
But only twenty-seven lived to walk back down again

And when the fight was over
And when Old Glory raised
Among the men who held it high
Was the Indian, Ira Hayes” (the Ballad of Ira Hayes)

The music itself is normally presented in long, winding strips, reminiscent of the stretched out, long, narrow proto-speech bubble you see on say, 19th century cartoons, before the more common, modern speech bubble developed. Here Kleist uses speech bubbles for, well, speech, the long, thin ribbons for the songs. Its simple but very effective, giving the reader something of the feel of music, the way it doesn’t always seem to come from one source but moves through the air, reflecting, echoing, drifting, carried on the wind, almost an elemental force. It also allows Kleist to visually display something of the power of music; for me he achieves this most powerfully in the chapter on Folsom Prison, as the music drifts out seemingly on the wind, across the echoing, depressing halls, through the bars, the razor wire and out into the trees beyond. Its hard not to think of the opera scene in The Shawshank Redemption and like that remarkable scene of modern film this too has a simple, elegant power to it about the ability of art to touch lives and reach through barriers.

(Cash and Dylan jamming in a studio; how much would you love to have been in that room??)

Its a wonderful read; in fact I found after I’d finish I had to go back and re-read it more slowly and enjoyed it even more on the second reading and I know its going to be one of those special books that I go back to every so often and read once more. Its a story of a 20th century icon, a man who bestrode pretty much all normal boundaries of genre to appeal to a far wider audience and a remarkable life. Its a story where the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan are just supporting characters (let me say that again: Lewis, Elvis, Dylan – I mean come on! Great flawed gods of music). But mostly its about a man, the darkness he sees around him that almost swallows him and the lights that lead him back out the edge of the darkness (although he’d never be completely free of it), the love of his mother, his lost brother, June. This will be going on my books of the year list.
Reinhard Kleist will be one of the guests at the excellent Comica festival in London this year; He will be in conversation with (appropriately enough) someone well known to Brit comics and music fans, Charles Shaar Murray on November 22nd; details here.

Logicomix is the brainchild of two Greek writers (the book was originally an unlikely  bestseller in Greece, staying on the charts for several months), Apostolos Doxiadis, a celebrated writer and director who previously created a shadow-puppet musical about Jackson Pollock,  and Christos H. Papadimitriou, a professor in computer sciences at Berkeley, who can count Bill Gates amongst his alumni.

Russell’s life, and his activities as a philosopher, mathematician and rationalist, but also as a pacifist, activist and notorious womaniser, proved dramatic enough to provide material for a tome of no fewer than 350 pages, in which the two writers look back to Russell’s childhood, his early steps in the world of science and the conflicts he needs to overcome to spread his revolutionary theories.

The book might have become yet another biography aimed at a highbrow-yet-popular public, but thanks to the ligne clair art of illustrators Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna, there’s also plenty to look at.  In the five years it took them to create the illustrated narrative, they not only took up Hergé’s style in an attempt to be as clear as possible, but they also emulated the celebrated Tintin creator’s maniacal use of documentation and reference.  Papadatos and Di Donna travelled across Europe and America to find the places where Russell lived and to recreate the backdrops of his life as truthfully as possible.

(a scene from Logocomix, by and (c) Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna, published Bloomsbury)

The book, which is scheduled to be published this week, comes with high praise from graphic novel author Posy Simmonds, who provided the quote:  “Logicomix is highly original, a rich and enthralling encounter with myth, maths, theatre and the giants of 20th-century philosophy.”   In the science world, the book can claim high praise as well, from people like the American historian Haward Zinn, Barry Mazur of Harvard University and Michael Harris, mathematics professor at the Université Paris 7.

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he’s a victim of the times…

…Well, there’s things that never will be right I know,
And things need changin’ everywhere you go,
But ’til we start to make a move to make a few things right,
You’ll never see me wear a suit of white.

Ah, I’d love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything’s OK,
But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
‘Till things are brighter, I’m the Man In Black.”(Johnny Cash, the Man in Black)

Just over two years ago we were getting pretty excited here after German periodicals Die Welt and Spiegel posted pages from the acclaimed German comics creator Reinhard Kleist‘s new work about the legendary Johnny Cash. Kleist went on to pick up several awards for Cash, including the Peng! award at the Munich Comics Festival and the prestigious Max und Moritz at the Erlangen Comics Salon and we were delighted to hear of an English language edition Dark Horse were planning. Then, nothing…

Step forward British publisher Self Made Hero, the same folks who have garnered acclaim for their Manga Shakespeare range, their excellent literary classics (like their Dorian Gray and Jekyll and Hyde) and their new Sherlock Holmes titles, which both Richard and I have raved about on here. SMH have lined up an English language edition of Cash for this autumn. And I’ve got to say I am incredibly eager to read it, we’ve been waiting on it for a long time now and I’m delighted SMH have taken it on, especially given the quality of their other titles. And on a wider front I’d have to imagine this is the sort of book which will interest a lot of non-comics reading folks – Cash was a cultural icon, after all. And if that gets more people interested in picking up a graphic novel that’s an extra bonus. I’m sure we’re going to hear a lot more on this closer to the autumn.(thanks to Doug at SMH for the cover, art (c) Reinhard Kleist)