Posts Tagged “biography”
John Seven • 22nd Mar 2010 • Book Articles, Comics, Uncategorized • biography, Carter Family, country music, Johnny Cash, June Carter, Reinhard Kleist, Sun Records
For a while there, it seemed like Johnny Cash was relegated to being a remnant of your grandparents’ pop culture — yet another old country singer delivering the same old Nashville clichés as any other.
But in the early 1990s, he hooked up with producer Rick Rubin — at the time best known as rap and metal producer — and began to record tracks for what would become his most important album in years — “American Recordings.” This not only reinvigorated his career and creativity, but also re-established him as the brooding man in black who is constantly on the run from his own darkness.
Johnny Cash was cool again.
It’s probably no mistake that in the 1990s, even as Kurt Cobain self-destructed in real time in front of everybody’s eyes, that the dark heroes of yesteryear were being trotted out as relevant again.
Frank Sinatra certainly benefited greatly from this — all of a sudden, he was getting his due with the younger generation, and the troubled Sinatra of the Capitol years was the Sinatra of preference. “New York, New York” was to be ignored — “Angel Eyes” was to be embraced.
Dean Martin found himself in a similar situation, thanks to a biography by Nick Tosches that framed his life and his psyche within the American mystique of booze and mobsters. The problem with Sinatra and Martin — and others who got the same opportunity during that decade — was that they weren’t prepared to match their revived cool cache with new work that seized on why the public had decided to look their direction again.
Johnny Cash, on the other hand, rose to the creative challenge and won, remarkably.
It’s Cash’s persona as not only a dark rebel, but also a can-do one, that defines German artist Reinhard Kleist’s graphic novel biography of the singer, “Johnny Cash: I See A Darkness,” published by Abrams. Tracing Cash through his childhood and up to the concert at Folsom Prison — then taking a leap into the future and ending with the Rick Rubin sessions — Kleist captures a man burdened by his ghosts and acting out in his life, but not letting those problems stop him from focusing on his great talent and harnessing that into opportunities.
Kleist rolls out Cash’s life not just as a series of actual events, but as a psychological and artistic space in which Cash inhabits the stories that his songs tell. Through dream-like sequences, Cash does kill a man in Reno just to watch him die — he does battle the world after being named Sue, and he does run from ghost riders in the sky who chase him down.
But that’s the power of Cash — and any great singer — the ability to make any song their own, to put it in a context where the emotions or experiences related in the lyrics sound autobiographical. In this way, a good singer is not just a good storyteller but also a good actor, and Cash was able to play the role of the Man in Black to great effectiveness.
But as Kleist makes clear, the role also had a way of taking over, and it’s this struggle that is at the center of Cash’s story, as well as the artistic endeavor to balance the role with the man, to utilize the role that is within the man to create great work while not letting it also pull the strings of the personal life.
That is why the “American Recordings” sessions are so important — Cash finally achieved that balance and control after years of dipping to both extremes. Kleist does a wonderful job at telling the story of a man through the incidents of his life, but he does a better one at capturing the flavor of his soul.
John Seven • 6th Mar 2010 • Book Articles, Comics, Uncategorized • biography, Che Guevara, communism, Cuba, Ernie Colon, Fidel Castro, Hill and Wang, Sid Jacobson
It certainly qualifies as an irony — and a pretty amusing one — that yesterday’s commie revolutionary sex symbol Che Guevara has been consigned in the popular imagination to some striking T-shirts worn by kids who probably only vaguely know who he was.
These kids are more concerned with buying into a fashion revolution than participating in a political one, that’s for sure. And it’s cute that Che’s face can still be utilized to offend somebody — like calling Obama a socialist comes off as a quaint, old-fashioned insult.
One further irony — or perhaps it’s more of a misfortune — is that Che really doesn’t inspire much more than that years later. In the 21st century, it’s his image that captures the imagination more than his ideals, fueled by his own Jack Kerouac phase. With buddy, motorcycle and memoir, Che isn’t so much inspiring progressive politics for Latin America as he is film adaptations of his book.
Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon take a dispassionate and reasoned approach in their “Che: A Graphic Biography” — one of the latest in exemplary Hill and Wang non-fiction graphic novel line — and this “just the facts, ma’am” motif is perfectly suited for younger reader.
It’s actually hard to explain in any kind of simple terms what exactly Che was. A revolutionary — what in the world does that mean to a kid in 2010? In terms of Jacobson and Colon — who have previously done fine work in their adaptation of the 9-11 Report and their self-penned follow-up, a history of the United States following that dark day — it means acknowledging the sex appeal without letting it obscure the meat on the bones in the career of a radical whose specifics are fuzzy in the memory.
Che — born Ernesto Guevara de la Serna — is a classic example of what Elvis Costello phrased as “a fine idea at the time, but now he’s a brilliant mistake.” An Argentinean rich kid with sharp intelligence, Che blamed many of the problems of Latin America — probably correctly — on the United States. For him, U.S. corporations lurked behind every corner, deep in the shadows, owning all opportunity in Central and South American countries and bleeding the inhabitants dry. No argument there.
Che’s passion for the people — and his embrace of communism as the solution — catapulted him into history, mostly thanks to the associations these led him to have. Many of these connections were made through his rich girlfriend — a woman he also took money from and begrudgingly married, even though she wasn’t quite up to his exacting standards of attraction.
No worries — even as Che winds his way into Fidel Castro’s embrace, he manages to callously betray two wives. He fights for the common man, but the women — they are another story.
The narrative cascades through Che’s career as a right-hand man to Castro onto his wind-down as a captain of his own revolution in the Congo — a disaster — and Bolivia. This last effort was where he met his fate in a naive attempt to replicate the situation in Vietnam as a way of drawing in the United States and creating a nightmare that Bolivia could climb out from somehow.
It’s the candor with which Colon and Jacobson deliver Che’s story that makes the book. They are obviously interested in presenting a complicated situation — one involving legitimate views presented through a sometimes stumbling messenger. They capture both the rightness and the wrongness of Che and the revolutions — including Cuba’s — that he stood at the center of.
Half a century later, communist revolution did not move like a fury through the world, freeing ordinary workers from tyranny — quite the opposite. With this in mind, it is perhaps best that Che is relegated to the flimsy adoration brought from T-shirt design, effectively placing him somewhere between Winnie the Pooh and Spongebob Squarepants in importance.
John Seven • 2nd Feb 2010 • Uncategorized • Alecos Papadatos, Annie Di Donna, Apostolos Doxiadis, Bertrand Russell, biography, Christos H. Papadimitriou, history, logic, Ludwig Wittgenstein, math, philosophy
It’s probably a given to most people that a sprawling graphic novel that concerns itself with the history of the field of logic — and the biography of eminent logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell — might not on the surface appear to be the most exciting subject matter ever put down to the form.
“Logicomix” — written by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, drawn by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna and published by Bloomsbury — dares go into that very territory.
Amazingly, it comes out with an exciting chunk of a story that is entirely unexpected by wrapping the story around a lecture given by Russell in which he faces off with World War II protesters.
Also injected into the narrative are the arguments of the graphic novel creators themselves, as they struggle with the lessons of the story and how to present them alongside the towering work of logicians through the era.
As a focus, they settle on madness, which seems like it might be the exact opposite of logic. Instead, it is revealed to walk hand-in-hand with it to some degree.
That mental illness crept into the lives of logicians with such regularity provides the thematic dots for Russell’s story as it glides forward in time. If madness is the letting go of reality, the logic is shown to be the disregarding of it, and this same departure from the world manifests itself in mind similarly. By focusing on a singular line to be followed, despite the landscape surrounding that line, the journey of the logicians can sometimes be one of disconnection and disassociation to the wider context of life. (more…)
John Seven • 29th Dec 2009 • Comics • Adam Rapp, Antony Johnson, biography, Brian Azzarello, Charles Burns, Dan Clowes, Dan Zettwoch, Dark Horse, Fantagraphics, George O'Connor, history, Holly Black, Jeff Smith, Justin Madson, Kazu Kibuishi, Kevin Huizenga, M.K. Perker, Marisa Acocella Marchetto, Matt Kindt, Oni Press, Pantheon, Peter Bagge, Phil Noto, Rick Geary, Ross Campbell, Russia, Scholastic, science fiction, Toon Books
Amulet 2: The Stonekeeper’s Curse - Kazu Kibuishi (Scholastic)
Creator Kibuishi certainly borrows from modern archetypes — Star Wars and Lord of the Rings in particular, as well as the films of Miyazake — but he is not content to let his own creations wallow in a bath of influences. Instead, his 
science fiction/fantasy epic for young readers leaps off the pages thanks to the natural quality of his storytelling — and having the story center around a cool girl character like Emily certainly helps. Kibuishi has so far skipped the lame supernatural fetishism and overwrought romance that taints too many young adult efforts, preferring story, character, and imagination in an exciting dance.
Ball Peen Hammer - Adam Rapp and George O’Connor (First Second Books)
Ball Peen Hammer moves from the dark allure of post-apocalyptic science fiction into an unrelentingly grim realm populated by unexpectedly noble characters — all rendered with an animated beauty by O’Connor’s hand. The stereotypes are turned inside out, victims of their own personal failures, as humans face a monumental and deadly challenge — and at the center is the sad and too easy decision to exploit children and in the process not only kill hope but create heaps that stand as sad reminders of moral failure. As depressing as it sounds, that’s what makes it worth recommending.
Batman/Doc Savage Special (DC)
Brian Azzarello pens an alluring vignette like something out of the ’70s Brave and the Bold, with strong stylized artwork by Phil Noto. He captures Batman in his younger days and dealing with the authority figures of the time — hence pulp fiction legend Doc Savage slumming in Gotham City as a diversion. In all truth, nothing much happens here — the adventure is basically dropped by the heroes — but this story mostly serves as a prelude for the upcoming First Wave comic, which will feature great DC Implosion characters from Justice Inc. and Rima the Jungle Girl, among others. The tone here is just right — serious but not overwrought, dark but not posturing — and it bodes well for the upcoming series.
Best American Comics 2009 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Charles Burns sets the tone for this year’s edition with a compelling essay that recounts his artistic and professional development as a journey through comic book collecting, where each tangent is a revelatory moment in his embrace of groundbreaking creativity. That he’s mirrored this volume’s selections in the same way is no accident. Easily one of the best in recent years, among the highlights are: Dan Zettwoch’s fictional history of a Church cartoonist’s newsletter; Peter Bagge’s comical slice of pre-Revolutionary America, and Dan Clowes’ attack on film critics and movie fetishists.
Breathers 0-4 (Just Mad Books)
If you want to read the best science fiction comic around, don’t look in any of the obvious places — Breathers is a self-published work by Wisconsin resident Justin Madson that concerns a gritty world of tomorrow that isn’t so far 
removed from today. In Madson’s scenario, the air we breathe has been infected with a virus for the last 40 years and people use stylish respiratory masks called “breathers” to stay alive. Madson weaves the tales of several people together in a series of shorter entries that create a wider tapestry of this future. Some are concerned with their own problems wrought from the situation, while others grapple with larger one — is the virus even real? Check it out at Madson’s website.
Cancer Vixen - Marisa Acocella Marchetto (Pantheon)
Suffering through breast cancer will get my sympathy — and my appreciation for bravery and chutzpah in the face of it — but it does not automatically mean I will think the graphic memoir of your experience is readable. In full disclosure, I couldn’t actually finish this book, so grating is the voice and narrative, and so amateurish and plain awful is the artwork. I read several reviews to make sure I wasn’t missing something, with the full intent of going back and reading the rest, but everything I encountered only cemented my reaction to this book. In contrast to what a good memoir should be, the narrative is manipulative rather than honest. Marchetto takes great pains to control our impression of her by compiling pages and pages of how successful and admired she is before we even get to the cancer. I understand that she does not want her readers to define her as the woman with cancer and have that image be our lasting impression, but then why bother to write a cancer memoir? The reader should be given a chance to discover her best qualities as she fights cancer, not have them dished out in an attempt to circumvent any impression we might have of her as a non-fabulous person with cancer. I bailed out at the diagnosis after having been pummeled by almost a hundred pages of constant bragging Also, I’m really tired of artists who who look as if they are relearning their entire craft starting with kindergarten level work when they go digital — it made an irritating story unbearable. This is a low point to the usually high standard of Pantheon’s output.
Ganges #3 (Fantagraphics)
Kevin Huizenga’s Every Man Glen Ganges faces a sleepless night and what unfolds is a mix of incoherent night rambling and time-passing mishap. Huizenga delivers a quiet tour de force that shows confident cartooning that thrills through its ease and craftsmanship, rather than stylizing the hell out of anything. His Ganges stories function as the American equivalent to Michel Rabagliati’s Paul stories, documenting a normal life with a sharp eye and a penchant for gentle revelation.
The Good Neighbors 2 - Holly Black and Ted Naifeh (Scholastic)
Spiderwyck co-creator Black continues her coming-of-age fairy-style saga as our heroine Rue starts to find her otherworldly family is beginning to take a toll on her friends, the resident Scooby Doo gang, and also that her mother isn’t as helpful as she’d hoped. Black’s first foray into the graphic novel format makes what is the now standard supernatural YA adventure more kinetic than most. and yet toned down in the histrionics and dramatics departments in such a way that grown-ups will have fun with it as well as teens. I confess that I’ll be glad when the supernatural wave in teen fiction dies down and a more open field of subject matter exists again — and also the standard plot of a kid hits a certain age and discovers he/she is secretly a wizard/vampire/fairy/spy/whatever becomes less overused — but Good Neighbors is at least agreeable in its use of these newly-minted chestnuts.
Insomnia Café - M.K. Perker (Dark Horse)
It isn’t a perfect work, but Turkish artist M.K. Perker’s stylized surrealist suspense tale — his American writing debut — 
has a lot to recommend it. Kolinsky is an expert on rare books whose shady past sends him on a downward plunge in the world, sleepless and at a job he hates. When he becomes involved with a coffee shop girl, he gets the opportunity to hide from his problems even as they snowball without his attendance. All is not as it necessarily seems, though, and Perker investigates the manifestations of that very concept from the eccentric to the unhinged. Perker is definitely one to watch.
Little Mouse Gets Ready - Jeff Smith (Toon Books)
If you’ve never considered that a children’s book about a mouse getting dressed would charm you into giddy happiness, you might want to pick this up. Combining the sweetness of old style Golden Books with a modern twist of a punchline, Smith has crafted a fun and funny little sequential picture book here — and Toon Books never disappoints, anyhow.
Skin Deep - Charles Burns (Fantagraphics)
Charles Burns offers a glimpse of what might happen if EC Comics existed today with three tales of intrigue and absurdity in this softcover reissue from the 2001 series collecting his early work. A master of the unearthly atmosphere — David Lynch has nothing on him — Burns unleashes tales of a man transplanted with a dog’s heart, a failing marriage with an alarming secret, and, best of all, an evangelist’s son’s encounter with God and his path to millions because of it. At once cautionary, creepy and curious, Burns is consistently one of comics’ deepest thinkers.
3 Story - Matt Kindt (Dark Horse)
In this somber and beautifully realized tale, Matt Kindt recounts the life of a real giant as seen through the eyes of the three women most important to him — his mother, his wife and his daughter. It’s Citizen Kane meets Gulliver’s Travels. As with Super Spy, Kindt’s styles are multiple and thoroughly accomplished, as is the depth of the biography that measures the perception of a man by the opposite sex. It is an area of mystery where expectations can outgrow and overtake the self that lurks within. In this book, Kindt comes up with a protagonist who is truly as big as the author’s ideas.
Trotsky: A Graphic Biography - Rick Geary (Hill and Wang)
Geary, one of the best practitioners of the non-fiction comics form, tackles the life of Communist thinker and leader by examining his ideas at a time when such radical naivete seemed like just the answer to oppression. Though it’s hard to say that Trotsky comes off as likable, Gear isn’t afraid to present the harsher side of the man in a fight for his own principles and some level of government fairness towards ordinary human beings, even when it involves executions of peasants who refused to fight in the revolution. A person like Trotsky is unlikely to exist again — we’re less tolerant of intellectuals and anyone with foibles — but Geary does a fantastic job at bringing the era to life.
Wasteland Vol 5 - Antony Johnson, Carla Speed McNeil, Joe Infurnari, Chuck BB, and Christopher Mitten (Oni Press)
The originally invigorating Wasteland series suffers another sidetracking setback — Vol. 4 with its foray into nomadic dog tribes was irritating enough. In that, the main characters and their stories were largely relegated to minor purposes, leaving them tied up for the duration of the story. In this volume, four flashback stories are presented, filling in details of the post apocalyptic word and leading up to the stories in the first volume. The problem is that no matter how well done these stories are — and they are extremely well realized, particularly with Mitten’s stunning color work on the final story — they are mostly superfluous. A nice time passer but I hope Johnson will get back to what made this series truly interesting. To that end, I highly recommend the first 3 volumes of the series if you haven’t read them already.
Wet Moon Vol. 5 by Ross Campbell (Oni Press)
Campbell’s ongoing series of graphic novels follows a loose group of industrial-goth art school students in a mysterious Southern swamp town. Based on his own experiences at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Campbell weaves a network of gossip, doubt, and confessions that creates a mystique of experience in those transition years between high school and adulthood. Campbell shows an uncanny respect and sympathy for every character who enters the story, which keeps it down to earth even as the strange feeling in the air begins to wrap mystery around the story in ways you can’t quite put your finger on, even as it careens into an wholly unexpected event.
Year of Loving Dangerously - Ted Rall (NBM)
Unapologetically frank memoir of the year Rall spent as — there is no delicate way to put this — a gigolo who traded his favors for a roof over his head and a bed. Not just one — multiple places of action and rest were his in 1980s New York City, and this maze of mattresses serves as a stellar travelogue to life at that place and time. If Rall comes off as a bit of a rogue, he’s a least one with an interesting tale to tell — a series of misfortunes that saw him kicked out of college and on the streets during one of the scariest times in NYC history to be a homeless person.
John Seven • 1st Aug 2009 • Book Articles, Comics, Photography • Afghanistan, autobiography, biography, Doctors Without Borders, Emmanuel Guibert, First Second Books, French comics, memoir, Photography
With “The Photographer,” the team of Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefevre and Frederic Lemercier have created something new. Part travel book, part graphic novel and part photography monograph, Lefevre’s journey through Afghanistan with a team from Doctors Without Borders has been translated into an affecting memoir that weaves real emotions and experience with superior storytelling and design.
Lefevre — who unfortunately died from a heart attack in 2007 — was a French photographer who chronicled his experience in Afghanistan in 1987. He told the stories to friend Guibert — an accomplished and acclaimed artist — and along with Lemercier, who designed and colored the book, his tales were realized as a massive and meticulous work of autobiography and travelogue.
Lefevre’s story follows him on his journey by land through Pakistan and into Afghanistan and back again — as well as every bit in between. It’s a trip fraught with a looming fear of danger, in which strangers in a strange land cannot trust that everything won’t fall apart at any given moment. As the doctors navigate the war-torn landscape, they also deal with a parade of drug dealers and soldiers and stricken poor and innocent victims of war — and the book’s portrayals of these people move past any stereotypes you might expect as it examines the gray humanity of each person who enters the tapestry.
In telling the story, the visuals dance from Lefevre’s evocative black-and-white work and Guibert’s personable and stylized cartooning. Cleverly laying out the photos in contact sheet format — photography’s visual cousin to sequential art — Lefevre’s images add solid realism to Guibert’s evocations of Lefevre’s experience. The camera itself becomes a character whose viewpoint is represented throughout, a gaze that does not lie, even when it is pointed toward Lefevre himself.
Somewhere between the personal recollection of Lefevre — with all the typical foibles of human memory and the inarguable truth of the photographic images, this dual-media graphic novel lies in an important nexus that captures in its pages the way history is created and passed on. The truth is somewhere between Lefevre’s documentary work and Guibert’s efforts to capture the story from inside Lefevre’s mind and heart.
John Seven • 11th Jul 2009 • Book Articles, Comics • autobiography, biography, Carol Lay, Carol Tyler, Fantagraphics, memoir, weight loss, women's issues, World War 2
Two new graphic novels aim to present the words and pictures of an audience not traditionally thought of as targets of comic book reading — women in their 50s.
Carol Tyler’s “You’ll Never Know” mines similar territory to women graphic novelists before her — the life of her father and its relationship to her own foibles — and manages to make a work entirely her own, neither derivative nor overly familiar.
The framing device is her interest in uncovering her dad’s s World War II experience, but what unfolds in the story is an examination of the father-daughter relationship forged through a retelling of both their lives as well as the actual making of this book.
Tyler is able to take the genre of war veteran memoir and twist it around her own autobiography as a way to reveal not only how war affects a person but also how a parent affects a child — it’s the march of history through personal psychology, and it’s more personal to your own life experience than you might expect.
The book begins with Tyler investigating why her father never advertises his involvement in the war and a recollection of her many attempts to get information about that time.
Eventually, her father does open up and reveals not only details about his early war experience but also vivid stories of his courtship with Tyler’s mom. She puts together her father’s history through an impromptu phone babble one evening, as well as scrapbooks he has previous kept to himself. Tyler reproduces and embellishes these with genuinely gorgeous illustration, turning her father’s army life into a cartoon photo album in which each panel is a crafted page that reveals another moment in his life. As Tyler continues the story, though, she focuses on hints to an unstated trauma and wrestles with her own on-again-off-again romantic tug of war. (more…)
John Seven • 20th Jun 2009 • Book Articles, Comics • African American history, American history, biography, slavery
As Kyle Baker explains in the new soft-cover collection of his “Nat Turner” graphic biography, the focus of his work exists, for so many, on the fringes of history. While other pioneers in black history and the fight for equal rights are equally accessed by school children, Nat Turner sits out on the edge.
This is a testament not only to his danger symbolically and politically, but also the real danger he posed to real people. It is a complicated tale of someone who might have been a hero if not for the bloodbath he washed himself in — given the realities of his story, it’s possible to have sympathy, but it’s hard to have admiration.
Nat Turner’s Rebellion took place in Virginia in 1831 over a two-day period, at first populated by a some other trusted slaves to which dozens of others attached themselves. The action involved the murders and executions of 55 white people, half of whom were children, the result of a march through the plantations and even homes of poor whites. It was a slaughter that appeared out of nowhere — after years and years of historical build-up.
Baker mixes largely wordless sequential segments with small tracts pulled from Turner’s own words. Nat Turner appears very intelligent, but the labyrinthine and arcane quality of his ramblings often come off as someone lost in a fiery haze where the heat of his personal history has enflamed the intellect that he was able to secretly nurture. In this presentation, Baker has concocted a violent and disturbing Southern gothic tale from the point of view of the slaves — a dark mirror that shows the sickness that festered within them, one borne of the cruelty of their white masters.
All together, “Nat Turner” comes off like a fever dream pulled from history and the real movement of enslaved soldiers as an apocalyptic, Biblical plague unleashed on the God-fearing Christian tyrants of the plantations. Turner’s justice against these people and their system is a swift revenge with no mercy, not even for the innocent children — and that’s where his quest truly becomes unsettling. Like the Old Testament God, he doles out punishment for transgressions with no qualifiers, no degrees of sin allowed into the equation. If you can understand the history of cruelty and dehumanization that lead to such a fury, if you can understand the hate and violence born of such a background, it is still hard to rectify the slaughter of children with the greater issue of human dignity — and that’s a dark challenge to the reader.
There are plenty of non-fiction and biographical works coming out in graphic novel forms these days, but none so furious, passionate and complex as Baker’s work here. He draws the readers in and forces them to confront the reality of history, beyond the cold analysis of facts and chronologies. It’s a hugely poetic work capturing part of the dark truth of American history — one that reveals it as ultimately complicated.
John Seven • 28th Mar 2009 • Comics, Film • biography, Charles Schulz, Charlie Brown, comic strips, documentary, Peanuts, Snoopy
In unveiling the life and career of Charles Schulz, “Good Ol’ Charles Schulz” spends a lot of time on everything but his inner life.
That’s a telling tactic. Schulz himself comes off as a bit of a closed door — demonstrative neither emotionally nor verbally, there’s not a lot of the kind of gut-spilling that would lead a documentary to investigate the inner sanctum of his mind.
But Schulz is not a closed door and anyone who has read his long-running “Peanuts” strip not as a daily chuckle but as a slice of modern psychological investigation on par with the best — Ingmar Bergman could’ve made a live action screen version — could tell you.
Schulz’s biggest achievement in life was making the daily comic strip an intensely personal experience. He was part of a movement within the 1950s — though he probably had no clue that this was the case — that saw the raw emotion of alienation and a act of public self-examination seize control of the best of artistic output.
Sometimes this was front and center, but in the best of creations — and I think “Peanuts” ranks in that list — such things were subtexts that crept up on you, surprised you and hid from those who disapproved on anything but the idyllic.
Schulz furthered his achievement by centering his observations around children who sometimes seemed to act like adults. More to the point, Schulz made obvious that blurred line between the behavior of the young and the old, and revealed psychological life as a continuum. You don’t just grow out of or into neuroses and fears. Charlie Brown might have appeared as a child for 50 years, but that stands as a triumphant popular culture metaphor for the lives any of us lead.
On a personal level, Schulz seemed like a remarkably nice guy to know — a real goody two shoes in fact. This “aw, shucks” persona reminds me most of Jimmy Stewart, as does the darkness that lurked inside. It’s not that Schulz was hiding something with that manner, far from it — he revealed a little something about himself every day for about half a century to more people than most of us could imagine opening up to. What Schulz showed is that someone who looked normal, acted normal, did normal things and lived a life in front of cameras that seemed sublimely unremarkable could not only be very exceptional in talent, but also in depth and trouble. You didn’t have to be Jackson Pollack to be a troubled artist. You didn’t have to sprawl paint over canvases to investigate your pain.
What becomes apparent as the documentary moves along is just how much “Peanuts” reflected Schulz’s life, from the happy early days that are given loving tributes in some of the characters, to many later and rather sad aspects. Schulz’s first marriage is shown as reflected in the character of Lucy (who was based on Schulz’s first wife), particularly in the passages where she attempts to romance Schroeder while focusing on the riches she will achieve from their union.
Schroeder portrays Schulz’s focus on his craft at the cost of personal relationships. Charlie Brown’s compulsion to be liked, his panic attacks, they all reflect Schulz’s own feelings about his life — and at times, illustrate his own attempts and failures at fatherhood.
The most fascinating passage in the documentary covers Schulz’s mega-success — and his insistence on continuing to draw the strip despite that, even though most cartoonists gather a studio to do their work for them. I think Schulz was a bit surprised that his innermost demons caught the popular imagination and made him a millionaire many times over — but I don’t think he was surprised that there were so many other people out there who recognized themselves in what he put down on paper. Charles Schulz seemed to understand that he captured something unspoken about the American Dream — that we weren’t happy even when we had everything and even when every one around us told us that we were happy. More than anything, Charles Schulz managed to capture what it is like to be an artist better than any other artist I’ve ever encountered.
“Good Ol’ Charles Schulz” presents the history of a work filled with profound truth and jarring honesty, whether Schulz was facing his problems head on through Charlie Brown, or avoiding them through Snoopy. His great achievement was handing us such a large piece of himself for posterity.
John Seven • 18th Mar 2009 • Film, Photography • biography, documentary, Frances McLaughlin, Kathryn Abbe, Photography, women's issues
A new documentary offers a portrait of two trailblazers for women in photography — identical twins Kathryn Abbe and Frances McLaughlin.
Abbe and McLaughlin built successful careers as photographers beginning in the 1940s at Vogue — they studied at the Pratt Institute during the Great Depression — and continuing to the 21st century. The women are considered pioneers in the field, forging opportunities for women behind the camera for decades to come.
Nina Rosenblum’s film “Twin Lenses” interviews both women as the story of the lives and careers unfolds. Rosenblum first encountered Abbe and McLaughlin through her mother while attending an opening for her book “The History of Women Photographers.” Many of the living women in the book were in attendance. It was Abbe who came up with the idea for the documentary and approached Rosenblum with the idea.
“I loved their work,” said Rosenblum. “Also, Frances McLaughlin Gill was the first woman under the contract to Vogue, and when Cecil Beaton took the Vogue magazine photograph of the photographers, he left her out because she was a woman, so I thought that it was so important to do the film.”
(more…)
John Seven • 19th Feb 2009 • Book Articles, Comics • biography, dance, graphic novels for kids, Isadora Duncan
In the annals of likability, Isadora Duncan might not score high on many people’s lists. This has nothing to do with her legacy as a free thinking woman — it is mostly the result of the fact that she was a bit of a pretentious prat in an era filled with them. Duncan is an early mover and shaker in the belief that women could be just as self-absorbed and irritating in their lives as men had been for centuries and, at the same time, have some kind of credibility. By that standard, she’s certainly no less annoying than, say, Pablo Picasso — and the fact that neither of them were the best of people doesn’t diminish their contributions.
The problem with any biography of an annoying person is that the audience has to have a reason to care. In the more indepth works, the reason is supplied by the reader — the fact that you are reading the work at all means that you have some intellectual interest in the person’s life and work. More casual biographies, though — let’s say for younger readers — demand something different. Very possibility, readers have been assigned the biography or, at the very least, have pulled the choice from a list of biographies. I see it as a very simple task that is not always easy to pull off — the author must cover the reasons why this person is important and also offer some points by which the reader is drawn into this person, comes to understand the person on some level, perhaps even identify. It’s this base level identification that will lead to the pursuit of more depthful biographies, as well as all-encompassing surveys of the person’s work.
In the realm of graphic biographies, this might seem like a hard accomplishment, yet it’s a field that has several notable high achievers, a club that includes almost anything by Rick Geary and Andy Helfer’s Ronald Reagan biography and many others. The reason these work so well is thanks to a smooth understanding of the cartoon format for immediacy, while also using the structure to bring in information from various sectors of the story in order to provide context and insight, both visually and narratively. The sequential format keeps it entertaining and moving, but it can also be used as an abstract informational construct that puts everything about the story being told into perspective. Ronald Reagan, J. Edgar Hoover, Charles J. Guiteau, they all seem like complicated people and the authors involved in their graphic biographies made the attempt to put their subject’s motivations within the context of their times by actually explaining their times, as well as all the players involved, and using their subject’s actions to get inside their heads a bit. These are full and mesmerizing portraits of a bunch of assholes.
Which brings me back to Isadora Duncan. (more…)
