It’s Dark In London (March 2012)

“A portrait of London that captures the city’s fundamental essence as an exquisite mixture of lofty towers and gutter sleaze, of suburban gentility and urban depravity, of private vices and public philanthropy. Featuring: Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean, Stella Duffy, Melinda Gebbie, Alexei Sayle and Iain Sinclair”

The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward by INJ Culbard (March 2012)

“A psychological mystery from H.P. Lovecraft in which a man experiments with alchemy and resurrection”

“1918 – the young Charles Dexter Ward becomes fascinated by the history of his wizard ancestor Joseph Curwen, who left Salem for Providence in 1692. Curwen was notorious for haunting graveyards, his apparent lack of aging and his practice of alchemy. Ward physically resembles Curwen and attempts to duplicate his ancestor’s cabbalistic and alchemical feats, eventually resurrecting him. Ward’s doctor is drawn into Ward’s experiments and eventually bears witness to the full horror of Ward’s results as Lovecraft’s psychological mystery unfolds before him.”

The Lovecraft Anthology Volume 2 (March 2012)

“A sublime selection of Lovecraft’s greatest tales of cosmic horror”

“Graphic adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories ‘Pickman’s Model’, ‘The Festival’.‘The Picture in the House’, ‘From Beyond’, ‘The Nameless City’, ‘He’, ‘The Temple’, ‘The Hound’ and ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’ from an amazing lineup of creators.”

But I Really Wanted To Be An Anthropologist by Margot Motin (April 2012)

“The highs and lows of life as an illustrator, mother, blogger and shoe-fanatic”

“Meet Margaux: thirty-something mother, self-confessed geek, style-goddess and red wine drinker. We follow her real life, collected from her illustrated blog, as she makes her way as a freelance illustrator in Paris. Anyone who has ever worn inappropriate shoes to the supermarket or danced around the house in their underwear will be charmed by Motin’s irreverent humour.”

When David Lost His Voice by Judith Vanistendael (April 2012)

“A heartfelt portrayal of a family battling cancer”

“The doctor’s verdict is final: David has cancer. There is still a possibility of remission, but it is very small. And if the tumour kills him, David won’t have a chance to see his baby granddaughter Louise grow up. We see his wife become progressively consumed by the looming shadow of death, in Vanistendael’s sensitive portrayal of a family preparing for life after David.”

Best Of Enemies by Jean-Pierre Filiu and David B. (May 2012)

“The first volume of a ground-breaking graphic novel series on US–Middle East relations”

David B. and Professor Filiu draw striking parallels between ancient and contemporary political history in this graphic account of US–Middle East relations. Jean-Pierre Filiu is a world-renowned expert on the Middle East. David B. is an Eisner Award-nominated artist.

Rebetiko by David Prudhomme (June 2012)

“Celebrating the lives and culture of the persecuted Rebetiko”

“Athens, 1936. General Metaxas is cracking down on rebetis and their way. A small group of friends – Rebetiko musicians – wind their way through the Athenian backstreets, ouzeris and market squares dodging the police while settling disputes over hashish and women. With music at its heart, the narrative builds to a joyous party at its climax in this award-winning graphic novel.”

Picture A Favela by Andre Diniz (June 2012)

“A Brazilian photographer battles against his family’s criminal background and dedicates his life to art”

“André Diniz tells the extraordinary story of Maurício Hora, who lives in one of the most dangerous slums (favelas) in Rio, Brazil. In spite of the odds, Hora has made a name for himself internationally as a photographer. We are led from his challenging childhood living with his drug dealer father up to the present day.”

A Chinese Life by Philippe ÔtiéIllustrator and Li Kunwu (July 2012)

“An intimate portrait of China as depicted by a Communist Party artist”

“An intimate portrait of Chinese society told in a staggering work of graphic autobiography by Chinese artist, Li Kunwu, in collaboration with the writer Philippe Ôtié. Li Kunwu’s story is a personal one that is inextricably linked to his three decades as a propaganda artist for the Communist Party. We’re taken on a journey from 1949, through the Cultural Revolution, to the present day.”

The Wolf Man – by Sigmund Freud, adapted by Richard Appignanesi and Swava Harasymowicz (Sept 2012)

“I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window ”

“Based on Sigmund Freud’s most famous case study of his patient Sergei Pankejeff (later known as the Wolf Man), this tells the history of an obsessional neurosis. It begins with Sergei, who dreams of a walnut tree full of white wolves, interpreted by Freud as a memory of parental intercourse a recto. We follow this Russian aristocrat’s life as Freud and other analysts unravel the source of his neurosis. This case study, re-interpreted in this stunning graphic novel, became a cornerstone of psychoanalysis. This special edition is published in collaboration with the Freud Estate.”

The Nao Of Brown by Glyn Dillon (Sept 2012)

“Things aren’t so black and white after all.”

“Nao Brown is ‘Hafu’: half Japanese, half English. She’s 28 and suffers with OCD, but not the hand-washing, overly tidy type that people joke about. Nao suffers from violent morbid obsessions and a racing, unruly mind. She works part time in a ‘designer’ vinyl toy shop, whilst struggling to get her own design and illustration career off the ground. She’s looking for love – the perfect love. But in meeting the man of her dreams, she realises that… dreams can be quite weird. Nao meditates in an attempt to quieten her mind and open her heart and it’s through this that she comes to realise that things aren’t so black and white after all. In fact, they’re much more… brown.”

We remember Glyn Dillon – from way, way back in the days of Deadline. He was one of the secon generation of Deadline artists, coming in after the initial incediary rush of the mag had faded slightly  but that didn’t make his artwork any less attractive.

And then ….. very little. Bits and bobs around the place; Egypt for DC Vertigo with Peter Milligan, odd bits of Shade, Doom Patrol, Invisibles and Sandman and some other odd things. He’s taken the route of storyboards and does some work with Gorillaz and his old mate Jamie Hewlett.

But although we haven’t seen anything from Dillon for a while doesn’t mean he hasn’t been working in comics. Sometime in 2012 his graphic novel, entitled “The Nao Of Brown” gets a release from SelfMadeHero, who have this to say over on their website:

“We’re stupidly excited at SMH HQ this afternoon! Late last year we heard about an incredible graphic novel from a London-based artist. When we finally got our hands on it, the script was quite simply the best thing we’d ever read (seriously) and we had to have it. The artwork style embodied everything we loved in linework, colour and layout; the narrative was compelling, complex and original; the author passionate and endlessly talented. So, today we’re hugely proud to announce that SelfMadeHero has secured the worldwide rights to The Nao of Brown by Glyn Dillon.  We’ll be revealing more about the story of Nao soon, but you’ll have to wait until early 2012 to get your hands on a copy as this labour of love will take Glyn well over a year to create.”

One to mark for the 2012 diary. more at SelfMadeHero and Glyn Dillon’s Blog.

(Via Mark)

Original novel by Donald Westlake, adapted and illustrated by Christian Lacroix (LAX)

SelfMadeHero

Donald Westlake, writing as Richard Stark, was responsible for one of the best books of 2009 in Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of Parker: The Hunter. The Hot Rock, first published by Casterman in France in 2008, is the darkly comic flipside to Parker; a story of a bungling con and an increasingly ridiculous jewel heist.

It’s every bit as good as Cooke’s Parker, and may be just that little bit better.

Westlake’s writing in The Hot Rock is as good an example of the black comedy crime caper as you’re likely to find. – and Lacroix/LAX does the perfect job of adapting The Hot Rock to comic form. It’s timing is perfect, whether it’s for the thrills or the comedy. Westlake’s characters are archetypes, stereotypes, but they’re wonderful ones – in Parker we have the driven, relentless, hard-boiled criminal and here in The Hot Rock we meet John Dortmunder; the criminal mastermind – clever, master of the cunning plan, but so terribly unlucky – the comic counterpoint to Parker’s cold intense ruthlessness.

It’s June 1969, and John Dortmunder, newly released from prison (never a great start for a criminal mastermind) is contacted by one of his previous associates Kelp with an idea for an audacious jewel heist. There’s a small African nation in need of a team of thieves to recover a half million dollar emerald that holds special importance to the country but was lost to it’s neighbour in a civil war.

Dortmunder isn’t happy with the set-up, particularly with the African ambassador brokering the deal who seems to be very reluctant to let go of the purse strings, but reluctantly goes ahead, recruiting a 4 man team and sets about recovering the emerald from an African art exhibition.

(and you just know what’s going to happen next – don’t you? One slip ruins it all – Dortmunder’s heist is cursed with bad luck after all. From The Hot Rock by Westlake and LAX, published by SelfMadeHero)

And that’s when it all starts to go wrong. The raid on the exhibition goes wrong – they’re just one slip away from getting away with it – and from then the team finds themselves in an escalating series of audacious raids, with the jewel always seductively (and increasingly ridiculously) out of reach. From the exhibition they progress to breaking into first a jail, then a New York police precinct and finally an insane asylum as the jewel slips through their fingers each time. It seems nothing can go right for these ill-fated cons.

The story’s part expert crime caper, part series of brilliantly set up gags. It’s a great thriller, intricately plotted and brilliantly executed by LAX from Westlake’s story, full of the twists and turns that mark Westlake’s writing, he takes great delight in making each increasingly audacious raid to recover the emerald just that little bit more ridiculous than the last, milking the black comedy for all it’s worth.

It’s this delicious blending of classy thriller with black comedy that makes The Hot Rock such a great read. There are so many perfectly observed moments that will send a grin across your face as you read. Perhaps the best of these is the increasingly incredulious African ambassador’s reactions to Kelp’s ever more outrageous and expensive list of the equipment Dortmunder has earmarked for each job ….

(LAX nails the expressions every time, first it’s a truck……….)

(…… then it’s a helicopter. I won’t spoil the fun by telling you what the next request is, but trust me, it’s good. From The Hot Rock by Westlake and LAX, published by SelfMadeHero)

LAX’s adaptation keeps every bit of Westlake’s meticulously plotted thriller intact and does justice to the beautifully observed comedy moments but also adds something akin to a filmic touch on the comic page. Throughout the book he expertly fades the scenes, shifting effortlessly to the next setup, without need of detailed explanation, the art does everything, moving you along, beautifully, adeptly, seamlessly – this is just pure class . And the artwork in itself is a real treat, a subtle mix of exaggerated figurative cartooning and moody suspenseful scenes.

The Hot Rock is every bit as good as Cooke’s Parker: The Hunter adaptation, and perhaps, seeing how brilliant observed and executed the black comedy is throughout, even a little better.

But it’s potentially a book that, without the marquee name of Cooke to publicise it, will not reach the potentially huge audience it deserves, an audience who’ll absolutely love it. There’s a series of Darwyn Cooke adaptations of Parker coming out from IDW. I dearly wish there were a series of LAX’s adaptations of the Dortmunder stories. I think, in the end, I’d enjoy those more.

The Hot Rock is published in June from SelfMadeHero.

The Man in Black and White from SelfMadeHero on Vimeo.

FPI: Can you pick three comics/webcomics/graphic novels which you especially enjoyed over the last twelve months and tell us why you singled them out?

Doug: Asterios Polyp byDavid Mazzucchelli (Pantheon), Mademoiselle Else by Manuele Fior  (Delcourt), Dans Mes Yeux by Bastien Vivès (Casterman).

(Mademoiselle Else by and (c) Manuele Fior, published  Delcourt and Dans Mes Yeux by and (c) Bastien Vivès, published Casterman)

FPI: Can you pick three TV shows and/or movies which you especially enjoyed over the last twelve months and tell us why you singled them out?

Doug: Mad Men – Season Two, The Thick Of It – Series 3, Saving Africa’s Witch Children (Channel 4)

FPI: Can you pick three books which you especially enjoyed over the last twelve months and tell us why you singled them out?

Doug: Apples by Richard Milward (Faber), The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano (Picador) and Nudge by Sunstein & Thaler (Yale University Press)

FPI: How did 2009 go for you as a creator? Are you happy with the way you got your work out this year and any thoughts on the comics industry in 2009?

Doug: Really well, thanks for asking. We published five lovely new manga titles, began two new graphic novel series (graphic biography and classic crime) and bought some lovely UK and European titles for 2011.

Thoughts on the comics world. Hmm… that’s a big question! All I would like to say is that the UK graphic novel and comics scene is in a period of renaissance. If the UK, creators, small press, publishers, booksellers and readers can work together to build on that then we’ll have a scene that rivals France or America, if not in quantity, then most certainly in quality. That would be good news for everyone. My greatest hope for 2010 is that the ladies and gentlemen of the Press will learn that SelfMadeHero is just one word and not three (I didn’t know that! Joe). Without our dreams, we’d have nothing.

FPI: What can we look forward to from you in 2010?

Doug: Lots! We’re building on the success of our Johnny Cash graphic biography and have commissioned a graphic biography of Hunter S Thompson. Hunter has a UK artist/writer team and it is an astounding piece of work. We’ll have A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens), Heart of Darkness (Conrad) and Tristram Shandy (Sterne) in the Eye Classics series – three wonderful graphic novels, two of which have been originated by SelfMadeHero.

We’ll also have Wolf Man, which is the first in our Graphic Freud series. We’re working with the Freud Estate, Freud Museum and The Royal College of Art on this long term project. I’m afraid, you’ll have to wait a little longer to hear what we’ve bought from Europe, but all I will say is that we’ll be publishing some truly excellent original graphic novels in a special series.

FPI: And one final, special question – since its not only the end of the year approaching but also the end of the decade, is there any comics work you’d especially pick out as one of the best you’ve read this decade?

Doug: Buddha by Osamu Tezuka.

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.

By William Shakespeare, adapted by Richard Appignanesi, illustrated by Nana Li

Self Made Hero

Another entertaining exploration of the world of Shakespeare using Manga stylings from Self Made Hero’s Manga Shakespeare line – but I knew what to expect this time, having only recently reviewed The Merchant Of Venice and really a lot of what I said there can be assumed to be true here. It’s yet another very classy adaptation that stays very true to the original whilst updating the styling and storytelling for a modern audience. It’s as wonderful and entertaining as Twelth Night always was, just this time with a different style and a different setting. If you already enjoy Shakespeare you’ll find much to enjoy here and if you don’t like Shakespeare (and let’s face it, that’s normally because you were turned off him at school), then this is a great opportunity to approach this wonderful comedy from a different perspective.

Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s comedies, and like most of his comedic work relies on a good deal of wordplay, a goodly collection of fools and that old staple; the mistaken identity, cross-dressing unrequited love triangle. The greatness of Shakespeare’s comedy, at least as I’ve always seen it is that essentially he’s often just telling what we’d immediately recognise as a good, funny screwball romantic comedy. If he’d been writing in the last century he would have made countless Cary Grant films and managed to work the Marx Brothers in as an extra.

(“Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness”, Viola/Cesario ponders the tangled love triangle she’s in the middle of. From Twelfth Night. The books full of these lovely, inventive panel arrangements by artist Nana Li.)

Countess Olivia is in mourning for her brother, her castle is a cold, joyless place even in the run up to Christmas and she has no time for thoughts of love. Yet Olivia’s neighbour; Duke Orsino is madly in love with her and desperate to find a way to make her fall for him. Enter identical twins Viola and Sebastian, washed up on the shores of Illyria, both thinking the other dead. Viola disguises herself as a boy and, going by the name Cesario quickly lands a job with and immediately falls in love with Duke Orsino who sends Cesario/Viola to convince Olivia of his love, but Olivia meanwhile falls in love with Cesario/Viola. The triangle is made, unrequited love is all around. But don’t forget Sebastian, Viola’s twin brother – could he be the solution to all this and allow everyone to get their own Merry Christmas with the love they want? It’s Shakespeare – of course they do! All’s well that ends well after all.

In addition to this, we have the other Shakespeare staple, the fools and a great comedy villain, played here in delightfully pompous fashion by Countess Olivia’s puritanical, hated butler Malvolio. The fools consist of Olivia’s Jester Feste, her drunken uncle Toby Belch and his rich friend Sir Andrew Aguecheek, whom Toby has convinced has a chance at Olivia’s hand. This trio, along with feisty maid Maria hatch a plot to humiliate the hated butler Malvolio. In true Shakespeare style this plot is calculating and funny, a wonderfully silly subplot to offset the romances of the main players.

(Nana Li’s artwork – a lovely steampunk 19th Century update to the tale of Twelfth Night)

As with Faye Yong’s work on The Merchant Of Venice, Nana Li’s artwork here is lovely. Her pages have all the required style and dynamism for a Manga page but still maintain a relaxed pace more suited to this gentle romantic comedy. One inspired touch, as seen in the illustration above, is the decision to tranfer the action to some imaginary steampunk influenced point in the 19th Century, allowing Li to go wild with those retro-futurist clothes and the steampunk tech on display all the way through the book.

Like Merchant Of Venice, Twelfth Night does exactly what it’s intended to do; brings Shakespeare out into the modern world, giving it a very stylish update and, hopefully, opening it up to an entirely new readership who’ll find a real and genuine love of his work in these pages.

Richard Bruton

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)