Often called “the father of the motion picture,” Eadweard Muybridge is best remembered for his 1878 series of photographs that show a horse in motion, its legs off the ground for a split second as it gallops on a track in Palo Alto, California. The panels of these famous images are featured in Muybridge (Drawn & Quarterly, April 29), an exuberant graphic biography by Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle. It’s an ideal pairing, as the book, too, is made up of panels, each vividly relating the eventful life of the English photographer who made his way to San Francisco after trying his hand as a bookseller—and escaping prison time for killing his wife’s lover. Numerous biographies have been written about Muybridge, but Delisle’s approach is welcome because it allows the author to visually depict a story that is centered on visuals: As an artist, Delisle has the freedom to jump across continents and time periods, showing his subject journeying by ship, hiking with his cameras in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and being thrown from a stagecoach, nearly dying. Muybridge took tens of thousands of photographs, but relatively few images of the photographer himself exist. So it’s a delight to see how Delisle pictures Muybridge, the photographer’s stern eyebrows and long and scruffy beard accentuating his grouchiness—and fury.
In their graphic biography, Will Eisner (NBM, July 15), author Stephen Weiner and cartoonist Dan Mazur also transport readers back in time to tell the story of another man made famous by his images: the beloved titular cartoonist. Whereas Muybridge photographed what he saw around the world, Eisner traveled in his mind, drawing imagined realms that took readers far from their own lives—as Weiner and Mazur show, Eisner grew up poor in New York City, finding an escape in adventure stories. Our review calls the book “a heartfelt and absorbing biography of a master cartoonist, fittingly told in arresting images.”
Graphic storytelling has also proved highly liberating for authors exploring their lives in the context of those who came before them. Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir, Maus, is a masterpiece of the form, and as the Swedish cartoonist Joanna Rubin Dranger writes in her own stirring memoir, Remember Us to Life (Ten Speed Press, April 8), Maus is the book that made her want to know more about her Jewish past—and made her fall in love with visual storytelling. Rubin Dranger’s ambitious work, translated by Maura Tavares, is “a beautifully introspective account of a Jewish author learning about her roots—and a dark side of Swedish history,” writes our critic.
And then there is the power of visual storytelling to chronicle present-day events, to act as journalism. In The Dissident Club: Chronicle of a Pakistani Journalist in Exile (Arsenal Pulp Press, April 22), Taha Siddiqui, with an assist from illustrator Hubert Maury and translator David Homel, recounts his harrowing escape from armed would-be kidnappers—the journalist is targeted for having spoken out against the Islamic republic’s authoritarian rule. It’s a serious subject, but the tone of the book is often playful and funny, perfect for its genre: Autocratic thugs might want Siddiqui dead—they killed colleagues of his—but they can’t break his comic spirit.
John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.
