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Product Details
Hardcover: 192 pages
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams; Includes a music CD with Carter Family songs edition (October 1, 2012)
UPDATE JULY 2013: This book has won the 2013 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. This recognition from what is essentially the Academy Awards of comics is well-deserved and yet more sign this book deserves a large readership.
ORIGINAL REVIEW: A masterfully told story of a group of amazing people that saved and shaped a huge part of our musical heritage. As ambitious and densely layered as a mainstream literary novel, Young and Lasky's bio-graphic-novel (we need a "biopic" term for a book like this) of the First Family of country music, the legendary Carter Family, strikes me as destined to become a classic.
I've long followed Lasky's comics. The first Lasky comic I bought (from The Million Year Picnic in Harvard Square) was a mini-comic version of James Joyce's monumental book, Ulysses! I've been a fan of Young's comics for decades as he is an old pal of mine. His modern South classic, Junior Foods, remains one of my all-time favorite comics.
I'm really glad to see this book come out -- I've been waiting for a major work from these guys for years -- and this rich book more than satisfies. The book is a solid read, dense with layers of interesting information, characterization, period detail. It's all written, drawn, and designed in a subtly changing style that mimics the newspaper comics of the era in which the story takes place -- mostly a sort of amalgam of Harold Gray and Frank King. As the years roll on, the art and coloring shifts, just as American newspaper comics did. there's even some black and white "dailies" cleverly woven into the storyline. No attention is called to this. In fact, the black-and-white sequence happens during a time when A.P.Read more ›
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This book takes the format of the "Graphic Novel" and makes it sing. It's a wonderful portrait of the famous Carter Family, capturing the feeling of the rural South they came from and the imaginative, sorrowful mood that helped define the early years of commercial country music. And the sense of humor also.
The excellent artwork evokes the newspaper comics of the time. At some point an annotated edition would be fun!
The storytelling is equally top notch, building the story from chapter to chapter, bringing us close to the people and the songs. The storytelling is flexible, using short chapters that provide vignettes of the Carter Family career, the history of early radio, and American culture and history during those years.
I think this is one of the best books of the year, one of the best books I've read in years - graphic novel or any other kind. It uses the power of the image as flexibly as a good movie.
If you have any affection for or interest in the roots of country music you'll want to read this book, and read it over. Plus the book contains a generous amount of background material - and a CD! The edition looks great. Abrams is to be congratulated.
It seems it took a number of years to bring this to print. Yet there is no faltering. This is a powerful and sustained book.
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Excellent graphic novel about the career of The Carter Family, maybe THE seminal group of early recorded music in America.
It uses storytelling techniques inspired by the early comic strips to create something that's more fragmented - and truer to life - than a script for a streamlined Hollywood bio-pic would be.
The artwork by David Lasky is quite beautiful. It's clearly somewhat inspired by master cartoonist Robert Crumb's much lauded strips about early blues musicians. But unlike Crumb's short strips this book has the feel and scope of a real novel.
The coloring is beautiful too. Apparently it was mostly done by Frank M. Young - he's the guy who wrote the book - so he's clearly a man of both visual and linguistic talents. It would have been easy to create a faded (and perhaps somewhat boring) retro-look by using mostly low-key brown and yellow colors. But the varied colors used create a variety of moods for the different chapters - yet in the end it all DOES add up to something that looks faded and 'retro' - but not boring at all.
You don't need to be a Carter Family fan to enjoy this book - it tells an engaging and human story. But perhaps it helps if you're interested in American popular culture, or is a fan of some of all the haunting and compelling musical artists that have followed in the trail of the Carters... Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Dylan, Neil Young, Emmylou Harris, Nick Cave, Bonnie Prince Billy.... or scores of country and folk artists.
This feels like it could have been 'The Graphic Novel of the Year' any year that Chris Ware hadn't released his acclaimed magnum opus "Building Stories". Oh well, this will have to be the more modest and accessible - and maybe less depressing - runner-up.
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I knew nothing about the Carter family and never really cared much for their mountain music. Amazingly, I did not put the book down and finished it in one reading, or very close to it. It was fascinating how fame changed and did not change their lives, and what you sacrifice getting there. The graphics gave it a movie dimension that came to life for me.
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This item: The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song
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