Kleist's Bob Dylan, in a feeble episode, looks disconcertingly like Dustin Hoffman. His strangely pallid June Carter lacks the sunny vivacity and earth-mother sex appeal that made her such an effective dispeller of Johnny's darkness. Or can we? Real life can create characters more compelling than those invented by art, and even if we approach I See a Darkness as a myth of sorts, Kleist's talents sometimes fall short of the power of documentary truth. Just as we can admire Goya's Disasters of War or a Jan van Eyck portrait without any intention of researching the Napoleonic campaigns in the Iberian peninsula or of establishing who this Giovanni Arnolfini geezer actually was, so we can thrill to Kleist's version of the Man in Black as a dynamic pattern of black lines, a 220-page portfolio of inky expressionism. It's a work of visual art and, as such, arguably has no obligation to be true or comprehensive or fair or any of the other things that we might demand of a biography. This is where a biography in graphic form is a special case. Because he does a great job of the bit where Cash, spooked by a Benzedrine hallucination of insects crawling on his hands, attacks the footlights at the Grand Ole Opry (never mind that alternative accounts of this incident allege it was a mishap caused by a faulty microphone stand). Because I like how he draws raindrops impacting like bullets on flooded farmland. So, why am I writing about I See a Darkness? Because I like the way Kleist handles a brush.
Moreover, I dislike country music and have heard only a fraction of Cash's vast output, and Kleist's book won't change that.
#JOHNNY CASH I SEE DARKNESS ALBUM TV#
I've made no such efforts, settling for my memories of ancient TV footage, Wikipedia, and Googled excerpts from Stephen Miller's Johnny Cash: The Life of an American Icon. Were this book a print biography, an earnest stab at a definitive life, I would have dutifully read Cash's own autobiographies (he wrote two) and at least one more tome as research for this review. This surly punk, perpetually making trouble and refusing to play by the rules of the entertainment biz, could never have racked up the 90m record sales and middle-of-the-road ubiquity that the real Cash achieved, but if you can accept the parts of Kleist's outlaw-worshipping spin that don't compute, there's plenty of fun to be had. Kleist keeps him lean and wiry throughout, a fusion of Mark E Smith and James Dean in a uniform of open-necked white shirt and rumpled 50s suit. Kleist's drawing style is restlessly kinetic and this, along with his decision to steer clear of the calmer phases of Cash's life, makes the book an enjoyable if sometimes bewildering ride.įor much of his career, Cash was a woolly-maned, burly trouper who bestrode the popular stage dressed in frock coat and bow tie. Once Cash hits the road, it's one long streak of drug abuse, delinquency and crashed Cadillacs. Even the comedy ditty "A Boy Named Sue" is given several pages of Scorsese-style mayhem. A Folsom inmate serves as the book's narrator, and several of Cash's grimmer lyrics ("I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die", and so on) are enacted in fantasy interludes. No wonder: his imagination is fired by darkness.
#JOHNNY CASH I SEE DARKNESS ALBUM MOVIE#
The only milestone Kleist omits is Cash's cherished movie project The Gospel Road. Its spin was evangelical but its narrative highlights were the same as those in I See a Darkness – Cash's impoverished childhood in the cottonfields his early loss of his devout older brother his rise to fame despite numerous booze- and amphetamine-fuelled misadventures his religious epiphany inside a cave where he'd crawled to die his tortured detox from addiction, aided by his devoted second wife, June Carter and his most celebrated concert, in front of the rowdy inmates and itchy guards, at Folsom prison. In the late 1970s, no dime store or book exchange was complete without a copy of Hello, I'm Johnny Cash, a ¢39 comic co-produced by Cash and Archie artist Al Hartley, published by Spire Christian Comics. Reinhard Kleist's Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness is vaunted as "the first and only graphic biography of one of the most famous musicians of all time".
Pop culture turns history into legend with audacious speed, and sometimes the chroniclers are too young to be aware of previous attempts to turn their heroes into myths.
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