Skip to main content

Graphic Novels Tells the Story of David Bowie, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Jean-Michel Basquiat & Other Artists and Thinkers

If you're fascinated by certain artists and thinkers, you can learn about them from books. Anyone who has a significant cultural or intellectual influence on humanity sooner or later gets a biography written about them, and usually more than one. But how many get their own graphic novels? The versatility of the "comic book," long unsuspected by many Western readers, has been more and more widely discussed in recent decades. Some of those readers, however, won't believe what can be done with the form until they see what can be done with it. So why not show them the graphic novel on the life of David Bowie published not long ago — and if they remain unconvinced, why not show them the other one?

Few subjects demand a visual form as much as Bowie, because of the centrality of his ever-changing appearance to his artistic project as well as the need to evoke the effervescent cultural periods he lived through and did more than his part to define.

Hence the importance of Michael Allred's BOWIE: Stardust, Rayguns, & Moonage Daydreams and Nejib's Haddon Hall as graphic-novel contributions to the growing field of Bowieology. Comic artists and writers have also done well by other figures with places in music history: John Coltrane and Billie Holliday, for example, the subjects of Paolo Parisi's Coltrane and Blues for Lady Day: The Story of Billie Holiday.

We've previously featured both of those books here on Open Culture, as well as Parisi's Basquiat: A Graphic Novel. Conveying the life of a fellow artist, even one who worked in a different medium, poses a unique set of challenges to the graphic novelist. But it's one thing to depict the work of another, and something else again to visually reimagine it, as in BOOM! Studios' adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel involving not a few biographical elements in the first place. Other respected works of literature lately to undergo graphic novelization include James Joyce's Ulysses in Rob Berry's Ulysses Seen, and the "weird fiction" of H.P. Lovecraft in the equally weird Lovecraft Anthology.

You can also read a graphic-novel adaptation of a source work never completed in the first place — but never completed, one must note, by Salvador Dalí and the Marx Brothers. A collaboration between pop-culture scholar Josh Frank, artist Manuela Pertega, and comedian Tim Heidecker, Giraffes on Horseback Salad realizes on the page a film that not only was never, but quite possibly could never have been made. For readers closer to worldly reality, there's Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick's Feynman: A Biography, which tells and shows the life of world-famous theoretical physicist, teacher, and bon vivant Richard Feynman. Never before, surely, has a comic book had to legibly and convincingly depict quantum electrodynamics, safe-cracking, and bongo-paying — to name just three of Feynman's pursuits.

Related Content:

Download Theft! A History of Music, a New Free Graphic Novel Exploring 2,000 Years of Musical Borrowing

Bound by Law?: Free Comic Book Explains How Copyright Complicates Art

iTunes Terms & Conditions Adapted into a Graphic Novel: Read It Free Online

Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Novel Adaptation

Read the Entire Comic Book Adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

A Comic Book Adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Poignant Poem, "Annabel Lee"

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

Graphic Novels Tells the Story of David Bowie, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Jean-Michel Basquiat & Other Artists and Thinkers is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooksFree Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3hbRzOB
via Ilumina

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...

Drunk History Takes on the Father of Prohibition: The Ban on Alcohol in the U.S. Started 100 Years Ago This Month

There may be plenty of good reasons to restrict sales and limit promotion of alcohol. You can search the stats on traffic fatalities, liver disease, alcohol-related violence, etc. and you’ll find the term “epidemic” come up more than once. Yet even with all the dangers alcohol poses to public health and safety, its total prohibition has seemed “so hostile to Americans’ contemporary sensibilities of personal freedom,” writes Mark Lawrence Schrad at The New York Times , “that we struggle to comprehend how our ancestors could have possibly supported it.” Prohibition in the United States began 1oo years ago-- on January 17, 1920--and lasted through 1933. How did this happen? Demand, of course, persisted, but public support seemed widespread. Despite stories of thousands rushing bars and liquor stores on the evening of January 16, 1920 before the 18th Amendment banning alcohol nationwide went into effect, “the final triumph of prohibition was met with shrugs…. The United States had...