MUYBRIDGE

Getting off the ground.

Eadweard Muybridge led a cinematic life. The English photographer journeyed throughout the American West and Central America, heavy equipment in tow. For years, he toiled away at photographic techniques that led to patents. Most dramatically, he fatally shot his wife’s lover. And so it is fitting that he is the subject of a graphic novel whose suspense-filled panels zip by, adding up to an engrossing account of the “father of motion pictures.” Delisle, a Canadian cartoonist whose globe-spanning books include Jerusalem: Chronicles From the Holy City (2011) and Pyongyang (2003), begins his sweeping narrative with an adventure-hungry Muybridge departing London for America in 1850. Ten years of bookselling in New York and San Francisco lose their appeal, however, and in heading back east, he barely survives a stagecoach accident that puts him in a coma for nine days. After six years of recovery in England, he returns to San Francisco, determined to make it in the burgeoning field of photography. He succeeds. His grand landscape portraits bring him attention, as does his “Flying Studio,” a horse-drawn darkroom he rides around town. Here begins the story that makes the eccentric famous: Leland Stanford, the railroad magnate (and future university co-founder, along with his wife, Jane), hires the photographer to prove that a horse leaves the ground when galloping. Six years later, after much experimenting—ultimately achieving a shutter speed of one-thousandth of a second—Muybridge has the answer. A lot of this history is well known, but Delisle succinctly relates it in lively images done in a muted, old-timey palette. Guiding readers through the early days of photography and cinema, he shows how Muybridge, determined and intense—his brow furrowed, his hair wild, his beard long and pointy—led the way for future artists to make their own work come alive with the magic of movement.

A playful and immersive portrait of a man who stopped time.