The Man in Black and White from SelfMadeHero on Vimeo.

Strip! – Depicting the darkness in Johnny Cash, tonight at 5pm on Resonance FM, podcast afterwards on Panel Borders

Continuing ‘Education and comics’ month on the show, Alex Fitch talks to graphic novelist Reinhard Kleist about his book Johnny Cash: I see a darkness, an epic 224 page graphic novel that tells the life and times of the hell-raising American Country singer from early success to his iconic show at Folsom Prison and beyond. Alex and Reinhard chat about the artist’s varying style from project to project, his love of Americana and the travails of doing such a project in the nascent German comics scene.

I’m ready for my close-up Christmas special: Ghosts, skeletons and dinosaurs with Ray Harryhausen and Michael Punter, Friday 11th at 4pm on Resonance FM, podcast on the 23rd on SciFi London

In an additional one off special before this week’s regular I’m ready for my close-up, Alex Fitch talks to two creators of excellent Christmas entertainment. Oscar winning animator Ray Harryhausen has long been associated with Bank Holiday TV programming and Christmas wouldn’t be the same without an appearance of Jason and the Argonauts or Sinbad facing off mythological creatures. Elsewhere, the Hampstead Theatre in Swiss Cottage is the home of Michael Punter’s ‘Darker Shores’, a new play in the style of M.R. James’ Ghost stories for Christmas, which stars Julian Rhind-Tutt as a spiritualist escaping the traumas of the American Civil War. Alex talks to Ray about his career and meeting a new generation of fans at the launch of his coffee-table book “Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life” and to Michael about using stage magic and cathartic laughter to haunt theatre-goers in the gentility of West London.

On screen:

Electric Sheep Subterranea: Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, Sunday 13th at 7pm, Cinéphilia West, 171 Westbourne Grove, London

On Sunday 13th December, as part of our season of underground-related films, we are very pleased to present Guillermo del Toro’s much-loved Pan’s Labyrinth. In this wonderful Gothic fairy tale set during the Spanish Civil War, a young girl named Ofelia has to confront both the monsters of fascism and the terrifying creatures of her imagination. Smoothly moving between real and magic world, Pan’s Labyrinth tells the moving tale of a child’s initiation to life and death.

This will be preceded by the third episode of our popular Sunday serial, the sci-fi Western musical The Phantom Empire (1935), in which a cowboy, who is also a radio show host, stumbles upon an ancient but highly advanced civilisation living under his ranch… see what happens next!

Recent podcasts:

Panel Borders: Apostolos Doxiadis’ Logicomix

The first of this month’s series of shows looking at links between “education and comic books”. Alex Fitch talks to to author Apostolos Doxiadis about the graphic novel Logicomix- An epic search for truth which he co-wrote with computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou. The graphic novel centres around the life of Bertrand Russell and explores the history of mathematics in the 20th century, intertwined with the story of the authors grappling with the project’s creation. Alex and Apostolos are looking at the interesting structure of the graphic novel and how this relates to its subject matter as well as the nature of modern biographical comic books.

Reality Check: Sci-Fi comics part one

In first half of a two part podcast recorded in front of a live audience at this year’s London International Science-Fiction and Fantasy Film Festival, Alex Fitch talks to four practitioners of Science-Fiction comic books about their work; these include Paul Cornell (Captain Britain and MI-13 / Doctor Who), Bryan Talbot (Grandville / The Adventures of Luther Arkwright), Daniel Merlin Goodbrey (Iron Man 2020 / All Knowledge is Strange) and Paul Duffield (Freakangels / The Tempest). Alex discusses with the panel the use of comics as an underated way of telling SF stories and the probable future of the medium via the internet. (Part two will be online shortly)

Of course it relies on you having the appropriate tracks from the iTunes store already (or purchasing them), but for a comic like this about the life of an iconic musician I can see where that’s a pretty neat little idea to combine the man, his music and the comic biography into one package (and I’m guessing anyone who wants to read this probably has a number of Johnny Cash tracks stored already anyway). Although personally I’d much rather still sit with the actual print version with a Cash mix on my stereo (which is how I read much of it), but that’s just my taste; I love gadgets but when it comes to reading, prose or graphical, I’d much rather have a real book or comic. But I can imagine this maybe appealing to readers who might not otherwise pick up the print version and that’s no bad thing if it widens the reading audience for the book. And its interesting to see someone using the multimedia capabilities of the new tech instead of basically replicating the book in screen form.

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.

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)