Kleist’s beautiful illustrations show a disembodied nervous system rising from Cash like a phoenix from the ashes, then hovering above him, the visual embodiment of his addiction and a powerful symbol of his spiritual death and rebirth. The most stunning is when Cash, sequestered in his home in order to cleanse his system of prescription drugs, endures a profound out-of-body experience. There are also several wonderful scenes in which the artwork transcends reality for the sake of a visual metaphor.
his smirking half-smile, his pompadour hair that always seemed just a little unkempt, the way he played his guitar with his shoulders hunched, etc.). Kleist clearly studied hundreds of images of Cash and does a great job recreating his subtle mannerisms (e.g. Time and time again throughout the book he captures, in swaths of black ink and gray tones, the essence of coolness that permeated Cash’s persona. What makes Cash stand out from the pack, however, is Kleist’s stunning brushwork. That is why my books often have a more cinematic approach and don’t play so much with the possibilities of comics like other comic artists do, like Art Spiegelman for example.”
JOHNNY CASH I SEE DARKNESS ALBUM MOVIE
Kleist himself admits that “I’m not a big comic expert! When I am thinking of a storyline or a scene, my first thoughts are like movie scenes and then I try to translate them in the form of comics by using things like camera movements or cuts and so on. The action is largely confined to traditional panels and the page layouts rarely venture outside of familiar grid structures. These mini-strips work fine in terms of illustrating the underlying stories of each song’s lyrics, and do a nice job of breaking the book up into sections, providing an overall sense of structure, but they lack any kind of noticeable pacing, panel rhythm, or other formal technique that actually conveys the sensation of music in the silent medium of comics.īut Kleist is not an experimenter. Thus, interspersed throughout are cartoonish episodes featuring Cash, a dashing young comic book hero, seeking revenge against his long-lost father for naming him Sue, or foolishly getting himself killed for “taking his guns to town” despite his mother’s pleas.
Rather than “make music visible in a comic book,” what Kleist actually accomplishes is adapting the underlying stories in some of Cash’s most famous songs into mini narratives. These records were responsible for Cash’s return to the summit of the music industry late in his career, and for introducing the country music legend to a whole new generation of music fans. In an interview with Paul Gravett, Kleist explained that, “I wanted to give the reader a feeling of what I had in mind when I listened to his last albums.” These “last albums” he’s referring to are the legendary American Recordings, Cash’s final six releases (a box set of four additional discs worth of music were also posthumously released) which featured quietly intense covers of some of the most haunting songs ever written, recorded in Cash’s personal studio with producer Rick Rubin. Rather than a straight-forward biography, Kleist’s artistic goal is to capture the emotional experience of Johnny Cash’s music in a visual medium. That tone, of course, is darkness, and as Michel Faber points out in his excellent review in the Guardian, “Kleist’s imagination is fired by darkness.” This is evident not only in the stark black and white images that saturate the book in shadows (Faber refers to it as a “220-page portfolio of inky expressionism”), but even in the choice of a subtitle – Will Oldham’s “I See a Darkness,” a song Cash covered late in his career. It’s a striking interpretation of one of Cash’s most famous lyrics from “Folsom Prison Blues” (“I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”) and it sets the tone for the rest of the book. On the opening pages of Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness, German cartoonist Reinhard Kleist’s English language debut, a young, possibly strung-out Johnny Cash guns down an innocent man, then sits down and smokes a cigarette as the man fades away beside him. If it is well done, you can even hear the sound of the music.” – Reinhard Kleist It can do all the good things in both media. “A comic for me is something between a book and a movie.
The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.Ī version of this review first appeared at The Comics Journal.