Cartoonist Caruso (Heart Transplant, 2010, etc.) adapts Springsteen’s song about the inescapability of one’s own nature into a picture book.
We meet Pete as a baby in nothing but a diaper and a 10-gallon hat, and within three pages, the enfant terrible has been in jail and robbed a bank (strangely, in that order). In the blink of an eye, he’s 25—and has added murder and horse theft to his resume. But a dream of his own death drives him out West and into domestic bliss…until a bounty hunter arrives to hold Pete accountable for his sins. The text is taken verbatim from Springsteen’s 2009 song of the same name, and the work shares the doomed melancholy of many of the musician’s working-class ballads. However, Pete’s apocryphal origin and lack of clear motivation keep the book from delivering the complex ache of a Springsteen classic like “Highway Patrolman.” Caruso’s mix of cartoon figures and oil-painted, impressionistic backgrounds is enjoyably kinetic (the fleet-footed, bank-robbing baby is a delight), but the pictures’ literal representation—rather than interpretation—of the text feels like a missed opportunity for fuller collaboration. (What, exactly, was the vision of death that so radically changed Pete’s trajectory? Caruso offers only a skull and crossbones.) In the original, music lends layers of emotion, expansion and pacing that are lacking here. However, reading the book in tandem with the song (easy enough to achieve in the age of iTunes) breathes new life into the pages, Springsteen’s vocals illuminate cadences lost in Caruso’s packed and stacked Schoolhouse Rock!–style treatment of the refrain. But while songs can trade in atmospherics and repetition, invoking if not explicating, a picture book demands fuller narrative and richer interplay between words and images; here, there are simply lyrics on the page.
A handsome, undercooked curio best enjoyed by Springsteen’s devoted—and in conjunction with the source material.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0385-8
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Categories: GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Design veteran Chwast delivers another streamlined, graphic adaptation of classic literature, this time Mark Twain’s caustic, inventive satire of feudal England.
Chwast (Tall City, Wide Country, 2013, etc.) has made hay anachronistically adapting classic texts, whether adding motorcycles to The Canterbury Tales (2011) or rocket ships to The Odyssey (2012), so Twain’s tale of a modern-day (well, 19th-century) engineer dominating medieval times via technology—besting Merlin with blasting powder—is a fastball down the center. (The source material already had knights riding bicycles!) In Chwast’s rendering, bespectacled hero Hank Morgan looks irresistible, plated in armor everywhere except from his bow tie to the top of his bowler hat, sword cocked behind head and pipe clenched in square jaw. Inexplicably sent to sixth-century England by a crowbar to the head, Morgan quickly ascends nothing less than the court of Camelot, initially by drawing on an uncanny knowledge of historical eclipses to present himself as a powerful magician. Knowing the exact date of a celestial event from more than a millennium ago is a stretch, but the charm of Chwast’s minimalistic adaption is that there are soon much better things to dwell on, such as the going views on the church, politics and society, expressed as a chart of literal back-stabbing and including a note that while the upper class may murder without consequence, it’s kill and be killed for commoners and slaves. Morgan uses his new station as “The Boss” to better the primitive populous via telegraph lines, newspapers and steamboats, but it’s the deplorably savage civility of the status quo that he can’t overcome, even with land mines, Gatling guns and an electric fence. The subject of class manipulation—and the power of passion over reason—is achingly relevant, and Chwast’s simple, expressive illustrations resonate with a childlike earnestness, while his brief, pointed annotations add a sly acerbity. His playful mixing of perspectives within single panels gives the work an aesthetic somewhere between medieval tapestry and Colorforms.
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60819-961-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Categories: GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This black-and-white historical narrative, written and illustrated by Lutes, collects eight volumes of his ongoing comic book set in Berlin during the late ’20s. It’s a multilayered tale of love and politics at the beginning of the Nazi era, as Lutes follows the stories of three characters: a 20ish art student from the provinces, a textile worker, and a young Jewish radical. Their lives intersect in only the subtlest way—Lutes depicts them crossing paths at some great public events, such as the Mayday march that closes this part of his book. And Lutes plays with perspective in a visual sense as well, jumping from point-of-view frames to overhead angles, including one from a dirigible flying above in honor of the Kaiser. At street level, Lutes integrates his historical research smoothly, and cleverly evokes the sounds and smells of a city alive with public debate and private turmoil. The competing political factions include communists, socialists, democrats, nationalists, and fascists, and all of Lutes’s characters get swept up by events. Marthe, the beautiful art student, settles in with Kurt, the cynical and detached journalist; Gudrun, the factory worker, loses her job, and her nasty husband (to the Nazi party), then joins a communist cooperative with her young daughters; Schwartz, a teenager enamored with the memory of Rosa Luxembourg, balances his incipient politics with his religion at home and his passion for Houdini. The lesser figures seem fully realized as well, from the despotic art instructor to the reluctant street policeman. Cosmopolitan Berlin on the brink of disaster: Lutes captures the time and place with a historian’s precision and a cinematographer’s skill. His shifts from close-ups to fades work perfectly in his thin-line style, a crossbreed of dense-scene European comics and more simple comics styles on this side of the Atlantic.
An original project worth watching as it shapes up to something that may be quite magnificent.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-896597-29-7
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
Categories: GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2022 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
