When Comic Art Meets High Art, the Results Will Surprise You
In recent years, several graphic novel biographies of fine artists have come out — some more successful than others. One rule is clear: Don't reproduce an artist's paintings if you can avoid it.
There are two graphic novels out this summer about Jean-Michel Basquiat, and you're definitely going to hate one of them. Which one? That's harder to say. and Paolo Parisi's couldn't be more different: Mosdal emulates the artist's agitated lines, while Parisi uses flat zones of primary color, in the style of Basquiat's mentor Andy Warhol. Aficionados will doubtless disagree about which book works — but that was probably inevitable. There's something inherently odd about using one artistic tradition to depict the life (to say nothing of reproducing the work) of an artist from a different tradition. And yet, not only are
