An excellent look at a larger-than-life musician whose sounds reverberate to this day.
A Nigerian legend is brought to life in a graphic biography.
One of the first things that Fela Kuti—or Fagbamiye and McCreery’s version of him—says in this book is “They didn’t want a motherfucker like me.” The Nigerian musician is referring to his parents, who were perhaps hoping for a “normal” and “meek” child, which they definitely didn’t get. Kuti, the late founder of Afrobeat music, made a career out of being a challenger. As Fagbamiye writes in an introduction, “Fela’s story is your story—just if you were a punk as fuck musician who made over sixty records, had twenty-eight wives, got arrested two hundred times, and started your own country.” The authors begin by examining young Kuti’s life; the son of a suffragist and an activist teacher, he played trumpet in a band in London, then Lagos. In Los Angeles, he met singer and activist Sandra Izsadore, an American singer who introduced him to the Black Power movement. After returning to Nigeria, Kuti established the Kalakuta Republic in a Lagos compound; it was raided by police, and his mother was killed in the process. He would go on to marry 27 of his backup singers and dancers—his “Queens”—in one day. In 1979 he created a political party and tried to run for president of Nigeria. As Fagbamiye and McCreery show, Kuti was a complicated figure: “His ability to envision a better, more just society overlooked women’s oppression, the mere existence of the LGBTQ+ community, and the threat of AIDS in Africa.” The authors’ depiction of the musician’s final years is heartbreaking; the singer and band leader died of complications from AIDS at age 58 in 1997. Fagbamiye and McCreery do a superb job of outlining Kuti’s contradictions, and the book’s text is brought to life with vivid art that makes use of bright color palettes.
An excellent look at a larger-than-life musician whose sounds reverberate to this day.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063058798
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
An accessible, informative journey through complex issues during turbulent times.
Immersion journalism in the form of a graphic narrative following a Syrian family on their immigration to America.
Originally published as a 22-part series in the New York Times that garnered a Pulitzer for editorial cartooning, the story of the Aldabaan family—first in exile in Jordan and then in New Haven, Connecticut—holds together well as a full-length book. Halpern and Sloan, who spent more than three years with the Aldabaans, movingly explore the family’s significant obstacles, paying special attention to teenage son Naji, whose desire for the ideal of the American dream was the strongest. While not minimizing the harshness of the repression that led them to journey to the U.S.—or the challenges they encountered after they arrived—the focus on the day-by-day adjustment of a typical teenager makes the narrative refreshingly tangible and free of political polemic. Still, the family arrived at New York’s JFK airport during extraordinarily political times: Nov. 8, 2016, the day that Donald Trump was elected. The plan had been for the entire extended family to move, but some had traveled while others awaited approval, a process that was hampered by Trump’s travel ban. The Aldabaans encountered the daunting odds that many immigrants face: find shelter and employment, become self-sustaining quickly, learn English, and adjust to a new culture and climate (Naji learned to shovel snow, which he had never seen). They also received anonymous death threats, and Naji wanted to buy a gun for protection. He asked himself, “Was this the great future you were talking about back in Jordan?” Yet with the assistance of selfless volunteers and a community of fellow immigrants, the Aldabaans persevered. The epilogue provides explanatory context and where-are-they-now accounts, and Sloan’s streamlined, uncluttered illustrations nicely complement the text, consistently emphasizing the humanity of each person.
An accessible, informative journey through complex issues during turbulent times.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-30559-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.
The Book of Genesis as imagined by a veteran voice of underground comics.
R. Crumb’s pass at the opening chapters of the Bible isn’t nearly the act of heresy the comic artist’s reputation might suggest. In fact, the creator of Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural is fastidiously respectful. Crumb took pains to preserve every word of Genesis—drawing from numerous source texts, but mainly Robert Alter’s translation, The Five Books of Moses (2004)—and he clearly did his homework on the clothing, shelter and landscapes that surrounded Noah, Abraham and Isaac. This dedication to faithful representation makes the book, as Crumb writes in his introduction, a “straight illustration job, with no intention to ridicule or make visual jokes.” But his efforts are in their own way irreverent, and Crumb feels no particular need to deify even the most divine characters. God Himself is not much taller than Adam and Eve, and instead of omnisciently imparting orders and judgment He stands beside them in Eden, speaking to them directly. Jacob wrestles not with an angel, as is so often depicted in paintings, but with a man who looks not much different from himself. The women are uniformly Crumbian, voluptuous Earth goddesses who are both sexualized and strong-willed. (The endnotes offer a close study of the kinds of power women wielded in Genesis.) The downside of fitting all the text in is that many pages are packed tight with small panels, and too rarely—as with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—does Crumb expand his lens and treat signature events dramatically. Even the Flood is fairly restrained, though the exodus of the animals from the Ark is beautifully detailed. The author’s respect for Genesis is admirable, but it may leave readers wishing he had taken a few more chances with his interpretation, as when he draws the serpent in the Garden of Eden as a provocative half-man/half-lizard. On the whole, though, the book is largely a tribute to Crumb’s immense talents as a draftsman and stubborn adherence to the script.
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06102-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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