A handsome, undercooked curio best enjoyed by Springsteen’s devoted—and in conjunction with the source material.
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. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An original project worth watching as it shapes up to something that may be quite magnificent.
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
BOOK REVIEW
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.
Continuing his apparent mission to refract the whole of English culture and history through his personal lens, Ackroyd (Thames: The Biography, 2008, etc.) offers an all-prose rendering of Chaucer’s mixed-media masterpiece.
While Burton Raffel’s modern English version of The Canterbury Tales (2008) was unabridged, Ackroyd omits both “The Tale of Melibee” and “The Parson’s Tale” on the undoubtedly correct assumption that these “standard narratives of pious exposition” hold little interest for contemporary readers. Dialing down the piety, the author dials up the raunch, freely tossing about the F-bomb and Anglo-Saxon words for various body parts that Chaucer prudently described in Latin. Since “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale,” for example, are both decidedly earthy in Middle English, the interpolated obscenities seem unnecessary as well as jarringly anachronistic. And it’s anyone’s guess why Ackroyd feels obliged redundantly to include the original titles (“Here bigynneth the Squieres Tales,” etc.) directly underneath the new ones (“The Squires Tale,” etc.); these one-line blasts of antique spelling and diction remind us what we’re missing without adding anything in the way of comprehension. The author’s other peculiar choice is to occasionally interject first-person comments by the narrator where none exist in the original, such as, “He asked me about myself then—where I had come from, where I had been—but I quickly turned the conversation to another course.” There seems to be no reason for these arbitrary elaborations, which muffle the impact of those rare times in the original when Chaucer directly addresses the reader. Such quibbles would perhaps be unfair if Ackroyd were retelling some obscure gem of Old English, but they loom larger with Chaucer because there are many modern versions of The Canterbury Tales. Raffel’s rendering captured a lot more of the poetry, while doing as good a job as Ackroyd with the vigorous prose.
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02122-2
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
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