Cartoonist Keith Knight provides a raison d’etre for this book in his foreword. It’s about teaching history through comics. ‘Dynamic stories like this need to be told in dynamic ways….Comix do that’ a teacher says.
Like Lady Sings The
Blues this biography aims to capture a milieu rather than presenting the
life as a series of events and it is graphic in both senses of the word in that
it’s a picture book and it doesn’t shy away from depictions of drug use, overt
and secondary racism, violence, imprisonment and alcoholism . All of the major musical characters are
in there, (Lester Young, Artie Shaw and Count Basie) along with the predators
who profited from her talent.
We follow her from prostitution in the back streets to
Carnegie Hall through all of her ups and downs, her loves and losses, her
adulation in France and being made to ride the hotel’s freight elevator back in
the USA because ‘the guests are uncomfortable with negroes taking the public elevator’.
Billie is front and centre in most of the frames; several
pictures fill a whole large (25cm x 25cm ) page with full page portraits of
Young and Basie in particular. Billie’s in concert pictures are striking, with
her surrendering to the music, reaching out, eyes closed. The dominant tones
are purple and lilac with occasional splashes of red. Reminisces and flashbacks
are in shades of brown sepia.
It is a book that repays a second look. There aren’t many
words in it, (probably as many as are in this review) but the images reward a revisit.
Whilst the detail is often limited there is an energy and movement to many of
the images, not least those covering the violence inflicted on Holiday, both by
her manager/lover, Louis Guy, and during her time in prison.
Throughout the book there are listening suggestions highlighted
within the story (Easy Living, Them There
Eyes, Strange Fruit, God Bless The Child, Good Morning Heartache, All of Me) which
should send the reader to their online music provider to help them realise what
Lady Day was all about, and why we still care about her, though I cheated and
listened to an extended edition of Lady
in Satin.
It’s a good idea to represent black icons in a way that makes
their lives accessible to new generations and I enjoyed this book more than the
last book I read about Billie Holiday (John Szwed’s Billie Holiday – The Musician and the Myth, which is a bit hit and
myth). The bibliography at the end of The
Graphic Novel refers to With Billie by
Julia Blackburn and I would recommend that tome along with Stuart Nicholson’s
biography of her if you want a more detailed, and true, telling of the story. Dave Sayer
Billie Holiday – The Graphic Novel by Ebony Gilbert, David Calcano and Lindsay Lee published by Fantoons; Illustrated edition (2021) (ISBN-10:1970047135, ISBN-13:978-1970047134)
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