Ron WimberlyRezensionen

One of those graphic biographies where the subject -- the adventurous and heroic Eugene Bullard, in this case -- carries you past the shortcomings of the book's writer and artist.

Bullard fled the racism of his childhood home of Columbus, Georgia, and made his way to Europe where he could live without fear of lynch mobs. He had settled in France by the outbreak of World War I and quickly volunteered for the French Foreign Legion to defend his new country, first on the ground with the infantry and then in the air as the first African American fighter pilot. His story is by turns sad, scary, thrilling, and improbable.

Unfortunately, this book chooses to tell his story with a tired framing device of Bullard -- an elevator operator in 1950s New York City -- telling his life story to a television executive when they become stuck in a malfunctioning elevator. The narration lacks dates and broader context for much of the book. Without the cover copy, readers without much historical knowledge might not be able to tell what war is being depicted in the back half of the book.

The book gets bogged down a bit in the trenches of World War I for a little too long with some extended action sequences that feel like they could be stock footage from any number of war movies. The repeated wounds Bullard sustains are rather glossed over to get back to the action. It's not until page 265 -- 82% of the way through the book -- that the possibility of becoming a pilot is mentioned in the flashbacks. The book then zips through his aerial career and ends before the war's armistice and decades before the 1950s elevator sequence, teasing that they've only told half of Bullard's story. What?!?!?

If they ever do a sequel, I'd gladly pick it up. But there may be some better sources out there to find out about this extraordinary man.

nonfiction graphic history/biography - Eugene Bullard, African-American escapes Jim Crow lynchings of Georgia and becomes a war hero for the French Legion in WWII.

fast-paced action with a compelling narrative -- easily finished in one sitting. Some of the French is left untranslated but not understanding doesn't detract from the storytelling. Recommended.

Now Let Me Fly is a deeply powerful graphic biography about the first African-American fighter pilot, Eugene Bullard. Born in Columbus (GA) under the oppression of Jim Crow laws, Bullard dreamt of Europe, especially France, where he heard black people are free, safe and treated as fellow human beings. The eve of World War 1, he realized his dream, and discovered Parisian life, before joining the fight in 1914 to defend France.

The artwork is incredible and the story is really interesting. I was fascinated by that forgotten page of history. Even if the graphic novel depicts a dark page of history, it is easy to read and the narrative is perfect. Eugene Bullard had an inspiring life, never letting go of his dreams : from a ride with the gypsies where he learned to ride horses, to England where he mastered boxing, up to France where he served with the 170th Moroccan Division at Verdun and after being wounded, joined the Lafayette Escadrille and became the first African American fighter pilot.

This technicolor graphic novel re-imagines the tale of Romeo and Juliet from the perspective of Juliet's cousin, Tybalt Capulet. The story takes place in a neon-colored urban landscape where gangs of Capulets and Montagues duel it out with katanas.

The book was a pleasure to read even if the art was a little hard to follow and some of the Shakespeare-speak felt forced. And the character design in this book is not to be missed!

you can read it here - https://medium.com/the-nib/lighten-up-4f7f96ca8a7e#.syim27zbg

Romeo and Juliet in comic book form, focused on Tybalt, and set in a cyberpunk hood.

Wimberly used Shakespeare's play, cribbed from other poets (I caught some Blake), and reworked original dialogue to fit into the setting. It was super cool, especially if you're already familiar with R&J.

I'm very glad I read this!

Midsummer wasn't really the best time to start reading a book which is clearly set in October and has an emotional quality that is pretty dependent on the season, but I needed work on reading my graphic novel collection so I read it anyways. In comparison to the novel, I felt like the adaptation was missing something. The brevity that is required of graphic novels (and this was a particularly short volume) doesn't really do enough to capture Bradbury's eloquence, so I felt like I couldn't really get into the characters and that the strangeness of the circus was barely developed. The scenarios that were needed to bring the story to it's climax were so shortened by the adaptor that unless the reader has already gotten the whole story from the novel it's not really possible to understand the importance of the Dust Witch, the House of Mirrors, or the dynamic between the Jim and Willy. The one aspect of the story which they thankfully retained in most of its entirety was the role that the Will's father played; the boys are protagonists of the story, but it is their continual reliance on adults (who still understand childhood) that helps them defeat the danger of the circus for the time being. I think I'm going to have to go and read the actual novel again, so that the best parts of the story are refreshed in my memory.

Romeo and Juliet in 1980s New York City, from the perspective of Tybalt. Rival sword gangs, kickass fashion, street artists, macho bullshit, all of which was there in the original play but is cleverly heightened here by the setting and the perspective. It's more emotionally affecting than the original Romeo & Juliet was for me, but like all Romeo & Juliet retellings maybe, kind of gimmicky. But every time the incongruity of the stilted, Shakespearean language and the setting and subjects—not just the incongruity but the wit, the knowing wink of the juxtaposition—made me laugh out loud, I couldn't help but add to my star rating.

½

I'm not really a fan of quotes, especially in the modern era of social media. I always start to wonder about the context in which they first appeared, whether they are being properly presented and attributed, and the motives of the person presenting the text. There just isn't enough time to properly investigate each one.

That being said this book had immediate appeal with its strong unifying theme and a citations page.

A thin book of the gift variety, it's a quick read, with each spread having a very short biography on the left and an illustrated quote on the right. It's very easy though to get sucked into randomly flipping back through the book and dwelling on different pages.

The images are well-done and quite striking, hand drawn (I'm guessing) from photo references that can usually be found pretty easily near the top of a simple Google Images search for each of the subjects.

Ray Bradbury has written some of my favorite books and yet, for some odd reason, I've never read the novel this is adapted from. It's possible I would have enjoyed this graphic adaptation more if I had. I don't know. It was hugely disappointing. Does it count for anything that I liked the cover art?

Reading this felt like I was simply skimming the surface of something great. This book should have been longer to accommodate what I expect was the richness of the source material. I wanted more, so much more. I didn't understand some (most?) of the characters' motivations. The text layout felt awkward. It was a quick, but frustrating read.

[NOTE: I picked this up as an ARC at a conference.]

As far as I know, I haven't read the novel this was based on, and I haven't watched the movie based on the book, so I can't say how it compares to either one of those versions. I can say that I really didn't like this graphic novel.

It's possible that I would have liked either the book or the movie just fine - I thought the story itself was the best part of the graphic novel. There was something slightly creepy and strange about the characters and situation that reminded me of some of Neil Gaiman's writings. Unfortunately, I found myself wishing all too often that I was reading one of Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels instead of this.

Although I did think the story was interesting, it had its problems. Quite a few things were mentioned and then dropped, something that I don't think would have been as much of an issue if this graphic novel had been a bit longer. For instance, the boys' teacher, Miss Foley, makes several appearances. She almost gets trapped in the house of mirrors, and her nephew turns out to actually be a member of the carnival, made younger through the power of the merry-go-round. I don't believe any explanation was ever given for why Miss Foley, in particular, was targeted. At any rate, she shows up again later and then disappears. Nothing is ever said about her again. The same sort of thing happens with the lightning rod salesman.

Another one of this graphic novel's strong points was its characters. Again, some of the little details about them made me think of Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels, in which even minor characters tended to have interesting layers to them. Jim's mother only makes a brief appearance, but during that time we learn that, of her three children, Jim is the only one still alive, and we learn that Jim's father is gone. I imagine Jim's surliness and desire to be older is probably due, at least in part, to a feeling of being smothered by his mother.

Even Will's father is interesting. He's basically a decent man, but he, like Jim, has a weakness that the carnival can exploit. Whereas Jim wants to be older, Will's dad longs to be younger. He must have had Will when he was in his late thirties or early forties, and he regrets not being able to play with his son the way some other dads can.

Although many of the characters have a spark of something interesting, it's a fairly small spark. Like I said, this graphic novel seemed to be a tad too short. The story felt rushed, and so did the characters, but everything was intriguing enough that I might have to see about reading the book sometime. Happily, we have Something Wicked This Way Comes at the library I work at, so I could easily check it out sometime and read it, no ILL necessary.

So, the story and characters were ok. I wasn't a huge fan of the way characters spoke, which did not seem at all like the way real people might speak and made it a little hard to feel for the characters as though they were people. Where this adaptation really fell flat, though, was in its artwork, not a good thing for any graphic novel.

I wasn't a huge fan of the artwork style. I gave it a pass, though, because its slight strangeness fit with the slight strangeness of the story. I tend to prefer artwork that is prettier and presents characters in a more consistent way. I can't say that Wimberly's artwork is very pretty (which might not have worked well for this story anyway). I also can't say that the characters were very consistently drawn. That, in particular, was a bit of a problem, since Jim and Will kept saying how they recognized adults who'd been made younger by the merry-go-round because of how their eyes looked - if it hadn't been for them saying that these children were the adults, I wouldn't have been able to tell who they were based on their looks. Also, people didn't necessarily look the same from one panel to the next. I might've been more willing to forgive this if there hadn't been so many other things about this graphic novel that I didn't like.

What other things didn't I like? I could make a whole list. The flow from one panel to the next wasn't always very good - it wasn't always clear to me what path my eyes should be following, and, in a few instances, I read some word bubbles in the wrong order because of the way they were situated. Then there were my issues with how the text and artwork worked together...or didn't work together. In a good graphic novel, the text and the artwork are parts of a whole. I had a feeling that this graphic novel was too wedded to the original text - I'd be willing to bet that all or most of this graphic novel's blocks of narrative text were taken straight from Bradbury's novel. A little of that is ok, but it felt like whoever was primarily responsible for adapting this work into graphic novel form (Bradbury? Wimberly?) was either too fond of the original text or didn't trust the artwork enough. It's also possible that all that narrative text was meant to act as a crutch, to fill in for what the graphic novel wasn't long enough to get across.

While I was reading, though, "lack of trust in the artwork" and/or "over-fondness for the original text" seemed like stronger possibilities. When Will and Jim watch the merry-go-round in action for the first time, the panels show Mr. Cooger on a merry-go-round horse, getting younger, while the text describes Will and Jim's reactions and what they are seeing. I know that Mr. Cooger got younger because the text says he went from an adult to seventeen, sixteen, and finally to twelve years old. Without the narrative text, I probably would have assumed that the merry-go-round had turned Mr. Cooger into an entirely different person who happened to be a dwarf, because he sure didn't look like a 12-year-old to me. Of course, since the artwork was so inconsistent, this wasn't true all the time - sometimes he looked like a small adult, and sometimes he actually looked somewhat like a child.

Later, when Jim and Will bring a police officer to the carnival in an attempt to help Mr. Cooger, who had been greatly aged by the merry-go-round, the narrative text describes several of the carnival's workers. I at first thought that the blocks of text had been placed near the people they were describing, but I couldn't even find any of those people in the artwork.

Not only did the text sometimes describe things that weren't shown in the artwork (and that probably should have been), sometimes the text and the artwork were completely at odds with each other. The best example I can think of is when Will's dad's hand gets crushed. At first, the hand that gets grabbed and crushed is his right hand. Then, in the next panel, you can see that the hand that is actually being crushed is his left. The text specifically says that it was his left hand that was crushed, and in some panels it is indeed his left arm that he grips in pain. Then, in one panel, he's griping his right arm. Later, Will's father's right hand is shown to be bandaged. So, tell me, which hand was it that he really hurt? Either way, the pain and damage can't have been that bad, because he had no trouble holding a harmonica with his bandaged hand. I've never dealt with graphic novel ARCs before, so I don't know if it's possible that these artwork mistakes might be fixed before the book is released. These kinds of errors certainly aren't as easy to fix as typos in the text.

Overall, I thought this graphic novel could have been much better. Even when it was at its best, all it accomplished was to make me wish I were reading something else, either the original book, which I suspect was quite a bit better, or any graphic novel that it reminded me of.

(Original review, with read-alikes and watch-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

An okay adaptation, but I find the novel far more compelling and creepy.