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
As solid, thrilling and informative a guide to the life of the America’s most powerful authoritarian as one could ask for.
The life and times of America’s top cop, by prolific author/artist Geary (The Bloody Benders, 2007, etc.).
His work for National Lampoon and Heavy Metal illustrates his long-standing taste for the pulpier side of things, but Geary also does solid work in historical comics, albeit ones with a gruesome true-crime slant. He brings the same clean artwork and swift but steady pacing to his graphic biography of J. Edgar Hoover. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1895, Hoover came from a religious clan whose “family business” was the federal bureaucracy. Obsessively hardworking from an early age, with few friends but a careful eye toward staying politically neutral in order to advance his career, Hoover swiftly moved up the ladder from a lowly Department of Justice post procured for him by a cousin in 1917 to head the Bureau of Investigation by 1924. Geary expertly marks the exacting effort with which Hoover set out during the Depression years to transform the oft-ignored, nearly powerless bureau into a well-publicized and widely idealized national crime-fighting, gangster-busting force. Hoover was obsessed almost equally by fighting what he saw as the immoral poison of liberalism and by consolidating his power with that of the FBI—the two often seen as the same thing to Hoover and, thanks to his intense media lobbying, to the nation itself. In the postwar years, he became the embodiment of an American reactionary. Geary doesn’t stoop to rumor-mongering about Hoover’s sexuality—he points out that the cross-dressing story is most likely false—but he gives the director’s lengthy, marriage-like relationship with second-in-command Clyde Tolson the importance it deserves, particularly since Hoover publicly proclaimed such a rigid, outdated view of sexual morality.
As solid, thrilling and informative a guide to the life of the America’s most powerful authoritarian as one could ask for.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9503-2
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Unprepossessing but also winning snapshots of varying (non)importance from an unremarkable life that pretends to be nothing...
More autobiographical sketches, in no particular order, from Chicago graphic artist Brown (Cat Getting out of a Bag and Other Observations, 2007, etc.).
From the previously published first chapter, “These Things These Things,” through the finale, “A Tiny Piece of Myself,” the prolific author covers roughly the last four years of his small-scale experiences. A reader would have to be well acquainted with his personal life to see much of a progression from one year to the next; Brown’s graphic recollections can seem random and ordinary, and no doubt that’s intentional. The always hirsute and bedraggled artist makes the rounds in one story after another: drawing at Earwax coffeeshop, selling CDs at Barnes & Noble, listening to music, dealing with his cat, having touch-and-go romances that involve lots of waiting for phone calls and parsing of signals, not to mention negotiating dilemmas like whether to romance “smartie” or “cutie.” The art is lo-fi in the extreme, with cramped framing and people who look like the sort of hunched caricatures another artist might doodle in the margins before moving on to the main event. The book’s dialogue will win no awards, resorting often to a Seinfeld-ian blah blah blah method of elision. Chapters like the long-winded “Missing the Mountains,” in which he goes hiking and plays Scrabble with a friend, sometimes give Brown’s memoir the air of a chronically low-achieving slacker’s take on the form—i.e., exert as little effort as possible. But the bulk of the pieces charm with their off-kilter humor and sad-sack tales of the lovelorn, such as the brilliantly self-deprecating mini-essay, “How to Meet a Girl.”
Unprepossessing but also winning snapshots of varying (non)importance from an unremarkable life that pretends to be nothing but. Could easily appeal to those new to the genre.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4946-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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