By Reinhard Kleist, coloured by Thomas Gilke & Reinhard Kleist, translated by Michael Waaler (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: 978-1-914224-08-9 (TPB/Digital edition)
This book includes Discriminatory Content reproduced for literary and historical veracity.
Graphic biographies are a now a solid staple of publishers fare, just as biopics, podcasts and “tell-all” TV series similarly entice consumers eager for intimate, often salacious detail on celebrities of every shape and shade and ranking. Thanks to that apparently insatiable appetite for speculative if not actually fictionalised lifestories – officially sanctioned or otherwise – in movies like Walk the Line, Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman or shows including The Crown, Mr. Selfridge or Mr. Bates vs the Post Office, the demand for candid revelation is extremely high, especially as offering purportedly keen insights onto people and events we only think we know but presume we have a right to impinge upon is pure, primal unfettered monkey curiosity in action…
This one – originally released in Germany in 2021 by pioneer documentarian Reinhard Kleist (The Olympic Dream: The Story of Samia Yusuf Omar, The Boxer: The True Story of Holocaust Survivor Harry Haft, Castro: A Graphic Novel) – pushes the envelope on what exactly constitutes and defines reportage with the first half of an extended exploration into a world icon: an assessment that is wildly expressionistic and defiantly fully unsanctioned…
It’s probably fair to say that David Bowie spent his life (lives?) managing his own mythology and seeking to control his own story, but apparently famous people belong – at least in part – to everyone. That’s certainly the premise of this compelling rags-to-the-point-of-disaster saga, told in flashbacks and hi-octane fantasy set-pieces tracing the rise and early successes of young David Robert Jones (January 8th 1947 – January 10th 2016). Touching upon his many personas and innovations and especially exploring the sybaritic excesses, the tale carries the reader to the moments that ended Bowie’s American odyssey of near self-destruction in 1975.
Visual dissection and informed deduction plays out as traditional drama as Kleist depicts the background, family, maternal disapproval, hungry ambitions and subsequent early race for fame that gripped a music-obsessed, sax-playing Bromley boy and how he evolved a tactic of personal reinvention in his incessant chase for the stars…
On the way and via formulative days of gigging and making contacts during the sixties and seventies, we meet his tragic but deeply inspirational older brother Terry, best friend Marc Bolan, future wife Angie Barnett, exploitative management sharpie Tony DeFries, Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, up-&-comer Iggy Pop, groundbreaking fashion designer Kansai Yamamoto and many more people relatively famous folk. We’re on hand at the birth of Glam Rock and controversial but headline grabbing, dabbling with androgyny and “gender-bending” that led to the breakthroughs that almost destroyed him: the release of melancholic anthem of the era Space Oddity (with Major Tom consequently becoming a personal avatar haunting the singer forever after) and the birth of soul-sucking vampire Ziggy Stardust, a sybaritic alter ego who nearly consumed his creator…
As ambition, excess, and the dreamer’s love of science fiction fuel his inspiration, Bowie/ Ziggy hits America like meteor but soon the fallout starts taking its toll. Adoration and desire war with dissatisfaction and painful self-exploration and unless something Ch-Ch-Changes we will all be witness to a Rock‘n’Roll Suicide…
Arguably massaging history to explore the price of ambition and assess the cost of pursuing power, as well as the shocking threat and reward of sexual identity to society, this cautionary the tale is augmented by a Gallery of images encapsulating the man, the moments and his ever-present space-suited internal avatar…
© Text & illustration 2021 by Carlsen-Verlag GmbH, Hamburg, Germany. All rights reserved. English translation © SelfMadeHero 2023