The renewal of spirit through this striking collaboration reflects the way the Apollo has renewed itself through the decades.
This graphic treatment adds a new dimension to a music book that was already hailed as a classic.
Most graphic adaptations aim to reach new generations of readers with a work that is flashier but less substantial than the original. This collaboration between Fox (In the Groove: The People Behind the Music, 1986, etc.) and illustrator Smith represents a new experience for readers, one with an immediacy and vitality that text alone might never approach. Fox’s original was published to wide acclaim in 1983; that book illuminated the significance of the Apollo to musicians and to the Harlem community, detailing how it got to be where it was and celebrating the legacy that lives on. The current project gives Fox the opportunity to update the original and to show how, in the subsequent 35 years, the venue has expanded its offerings, hosting the likes of Chris Rock and Bruce Springsteen and a memorial service for James Brown. The narrative brings readers behind the scenes to the real show backstage and to the hotel rooms where the young reporter conducted his interviews. It also highlights the visual performing styles of some of the most galvanic artists in the history of popular music. Performers who were then unknown and were launched as winners of the Apollo’s Amateur Night competition include Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Luther Vandross, and Michael Jackson. Fox and Smith effectively present the progression of entertainment styles from swing and tap dance through bebop, gospel and blues, rhythm & blues, soul, and rock. They provide an entertaining, lively narrative with profiles that match the spirit, drawings that seem as musical as the music described within the text.
The renewal of spirit through this striking collaboration reflects the way the Apollo has renewed itself through the decades.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3138-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Lighter in subject matter than her previous work, Satrapi keeps things semicomical, even when relating matters of severe...
Let’s talk about sex . . . and the disappointments of men.
In her previous pair of graphic novels (Persepolis, 2003 and 2004, whose acclaim helped to heighten the recent push to further legitimize an always somewhat maligned field), the young author told the autobiographical story of her unsuccessful life in Europe before being forced to return to her native Iran, and the culture clash that ensued. This time, Satrapi keeps to her earlier themes of autobiography, Iranian womanhood and its conflicts within a traditional society being encroached on by Western ideas, while providing a somewhat lighter framework. Structured more as a casual conversation, a coffee klatch among the girls, Satrapi eavesdrops on her grandmother and relatives and friends as they talk about being women and, more specifically, about men. It’s refreshingly surprising from the get-go, as Satrapi introduces her grandmother as an elegantly made-up grande dame, an old woman who just happens to be a lifelong opium addict and who encourages Satrapi to close her eyes more—all in order to have a drugged look that would be seductive for men. Placed in charge of the all-important samovar, Satrapi listens as the women sip their tea and talk, because as her grandmother says, “to speak behind others’ backs is the ventilator of the heart.” In these anecdotes, men are uniformly imbecilic, or simply clueless, as witnessed by the story of the non-virginal woman who took the grandmother’s advice and, on her honeymoon night, placed a razor blade between her thighs so that her husband would think he’d broken her hymen. Things didn’t go well. More laughs are to be had, though often bittersweet, in the other tales in which women find themselves stuck between a patriarchal tradition and the desire for love and freedom, though nothing is made out to be quite so simple as that.
Lighter in subject matter than her previous work, Satrapi keeps things semicomical, even when relating matters of severe heartbreak, and her dashed-off drawings (with their slightly childlike expressions) help matters along.Pub Date: April 19, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42305-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Brilliant, passionately rendered reportage.
The true story of French animator Delisle’s two-month gig in North Korea.
The author accepted an assignment to work with a team of North Koreans hired to draw a cartoon series. This graphic novel depicts his time there, mostly in the capital city. Delisle stays at one of the three hotels in Pyongang permitted to take foreign guests. The 50-story Yangakkdo is mostly empty; the only floor with its lights turned on is the one with foreigners on it. Accompanied everywhere by at least one or two government assigned “guides,” the animator sees pretty much only what the powers that be want him to see. Even that limited view, however, reveals a fascistic and surreal landscape: a “phantom city in a hermit nation.” Delisle is a good guide through this overly ordered world. He genuinely likes the North Koreans and has no ideological axe to grind; he brings along Orwell to read, but doesn’t let it restrict his thinking. His sharp eye captures many telling details: a monstrously luxurious subway station (marble walls, chandeliers) that seems to be only for show; the empty restaurants; the “volunteer” civilians obsessively cleaning everywhere he looks; and always the passionate reverence for Kim Jong Il, whose portrait hangs “in every room, on every floor, in every building” throughout the land.
Brilliant, passionately rendered reportage.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-8965970-89-0
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
PERSPECTIVES
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