Posts Tagged ‘Sabrina Jones’

Barefoot, Pregnant, and Live on Stage

Friday, September 17th, 2010

Isadora Duncan is possibly one of the greatest dancers of all time, and yet her name is unknown to many (especially in the US). Perhaps this is because dance is an art of motion, and almost no film exists of Duncan actually dancing—only photographs, paintings, sculptures, her writings, biographies, and the personal accounts of those that saw her dance. In Isadora Duncan: a graphic biography, artist Sabrina Jones takes all of these sources and attempts to create a living, breathing portrait of the woman and her art using comics. This seems only appropriate, given that the nature of comics is to take static images and breathe life (and the illusion of motion) into them.

Jones’ curvy, flowing ink brush style suits the nature of the story well; her art does a good job of conveying Duncan’s free and loose style of dance. Duncan chafed against the stiffness of “traditional” dancing like ballet, and so this book eschews panel borders for the most part. However, that does not stop the book from being divided into chapters, nor from each page following a rough 2×3 panel configuration.

The dancing and art style might be flowing, but the same cannot be said for the pacing of the book, which jumps from place to place and from event to event in Duncan’s life. The transitions are rough, and not always clear, making it hard to distinguish where Isadora is at a given point in her life, or how much time has passed. While the beginning of the book seems to delineate the early periods of Isadora’s life with some clarity, her later years go by in a blur, with Duncan reaching middle-age fairly quickly. Maybe this is intentional; a reflection of the path of Isadora’s real life, touring through Europe and the United States, meeting new lovers, starting schools, and spending all her money, only to end up touring again in order to stay afloat.

Regardless of these narrative issues, Isadora Duncan’s story is fascinating, and she espoused many ideas which, though accepted today, were rather scandalous at the time, making her story rather revolutionary.

Isadora Duncan: a graphic biography
written and illustrated by Sabrina Jones
edited by Paul Buhle
introduction by Lori Belilove
published by Hill and Wang (New York, 2008)
ISBN 978-0-8090-9497-4

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Telling A Story With Imagined Pictures

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

The New York Comic Con was held at the Jacob Javits Center this past February 6–8, and with the number of TV, movie, and video game panels/booths available it’s quickly starting to rival the San Diego Comic-Con in size and scope, though it still lacks the prestige and probably will so for years to come. They’ve had trouble nailing down a date for their first four years, and the next installment will take place in October of 2010, a date they assure us will be steady for the next few years.

Buried in amongst the industry panels and Hollywood premieres were a few nuggets of intellectual or artistic goodness; there was a panel on “Asians and Superheroes” that talked about the role of Asian characters in general in superhero comics, promoting a new anthology that comes out in April featuring the work of numerous creators like Bernard Chang and Gene Luen Yang.

Saturday saw an actual nonfiction comics panel called “Telling a Story With Imagined Pictures,” featuring various panelists who worked on nonfiction narratives for publishers like First Second and Random House. Present at the panel were:

They answered a lot of questions about the creative process, especially the research involved in depicting real events. Both Crowley and Dawson noted it was difficult depicting events that people would have their own memories of. A lot of fact-checking was involved; Jones studied dancing and old travel guides to get the visual look of the book right, and she later had her dance drawings fact-checked to make sure they were correct. O’Connor had a different problem in that photo-reference wasn’t available for his subjects. He mentioned that the book has a whole scene depicting Mohawk armor, except that no visual records existed of the armor for him to accurately depict it. Instead, he had to rely on the cartoony visual style of the book to cover up the specifics of the armor.

When asked about the editorial process for graphic novels, all agreed that their editors have been largely hands-off, and speculated that it might be due to the newness of major publishers (like Random House) to the graphic novel scene.

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