Amazon.com Review
An incredibly compelling fictional biography of one of America's most familiar icons, Marilyn Monroe. Kathryn Hyatt, in telling this story in the comics medium, creates an atmosphere not possible in a prose biography. Here Marilyn speaks for herself--to her psychoanalyst, to a reporter--and ultimately to the reader of this book. Beginning where her unstable mother leaves off, Marilyn begins to dream of fame in early childhood. The reader follows Monroe's rise to stardom, progressing through the lower depths of Hollywood into the hard realities of stardom. Seen through the prism of Marilyn's inner world, her achievements and failures take on a new complexity and poignancy.
From Publishers Weekly
Hyatt has produced an eerily sensitive and engaging portrait in comics of Monroe, conveying the movie star's efforts to retain her sense of identity, her dedication to acting, her disappointments (and the men who contributed to them) and her struggles to control her now legendary career. Hyatt's portrait is one of an insecure, ordinary girl shaped early on by her family's precarious situation and movie-induced fantasies of glamour, beauty and mass attention. Raised in an orphanage after her mother's mental breakdown, Monroe, in Hyatt's portrait, seems in search of an honest emotional security that was always just beyond her grasp. What shines through is her devotion to acting (candidly critical of her own early talent, she worked hard to improve) and her perfectionism-a penchant for endless numbers of takes was not always appreciated by her directors. Hyatt focuses on several men: agent Johnny Hyde, who left his wife to devote himself to her early career; the sexually and economically exploitative studio bosses; and husband and playwright Arthur Miller, who in one arresting sequence announces their marriage on TV before consulting Monroe. Hyatt's drawing can be awkward and her subjects sometimes end up looking generic, but the surreal visual simplicity manages to sustain both narrative clarity and an affecting emotional undercurrent.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
