When Did You Last See Them?

Yesterday I explored the authorship of Booth, a well researched graphic historical novel about the man who killed Abraham Lincoln. That was one question the book left me with.

My other question was: Why was this book so hard to read?

Jared Gardner at Guttergeek faults scripter C. C. Colbert for not understanding the comics form well enough to use it to undercut the unpleasant character of John Wilkes Booth. But Gardner starts his criticism with the art:

This is an unpleasant book to read visually: the “evocative” brushwork of the French theorist and artist Tanitoc is often ungainly and terribly uneven, the faces are either indistinguishable or just plain ugly, and the coloring by the talented Hilary Sycamore (Laika, Journey into Mohawk Country) relies on a palette predictably designed to evoke old-timey-ness and which ends up…instead evoking muddiness. It is simply not a fun book to look at.

To that I add that it’s not an easy book to read, either. Not only are faces indistinguishable, but Tanitoc’s word balloons add to the confusion of who’s who and who says what.

Take this panel, for example. The curve in the tail of the balloon at the left suggests that its words come from the balding man looking away from us. But in fact those words are those of John Wilkes Booth, in the muddy green. If I hadn’t remembered that in real life Booth claimed to have thrust himself into the John Brown affair, I would never have been able to interpret this panel.

And here’s another one. Tanitoc has drawn Edwin Booth behind his younger brother, only his shins and feet showing. All the word balloons point to the same area. The balloon at the upper right is meant to come from Edwin, and that at the lower right from John, even though it’s pointing to Edwin’s shoes and not John’s head.

And check the panel at the top of this entry. The first balloon appears to depict words coming from empty space.

I was actually grateful to colorist Sycamore. If she hadn’t kept John Wilkes Booth consistently in green, I probably would have lost him many times.

What’s the Story Behind C. C. Colbert?

After reading the graphic historical novel Booth, scripted by C. C. Colbert and drawn by Tanitoc, I had a couple of questions.

The first was, What’s the story behind C. C. Colbert? The author bio on the back flap is awkwardly worded enough to suggest that whoever composed it was trying to write around something:

C. C. Colbert remains fascinated by the Civil War and has spent several years in the United States researching topics of American history. After earning a degree in history from Princeton, Colbert now lives and writes in Ireland.

I should hope that an author’s interest in Civil War history would not be exhausted by writing one book about it; otherwise, perhaps that person shouldn’t be writing that book. As for “researching topics” and “earning a degree,” I’ve done those things myself, so am I supposed to be impressed?

The author’s note inside refers to “my two sons,…and their father.” It also quotes the bleak opening of Dante’s Inferno: “midway in the journey…I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.” (Hollander translation, apparently.) What unstated psychological drama warranted a quote from Dante?

Publicity interviews lay bare the mystery. C. C. Colbert is the married name of Catherine Clinton, a noted historian of women’s lives in the era of the Civil War and biographer of Harriet Tubman and Mary Todd Lincoln. Several years ago she left full-time academia to write more books, including children’s books. More recently, in addition to experimenting with the comics form in Booth, Clinton has returned to the university life, at Queen’s University in Belfast.

So the vague phrase “earned a degree” blurs the fact that Clinton has a Ph.D. from Princeton, where she studied under James M. MacPherson, after earning a bachelor’s from Harvard and a master’s from the University of Sussex. Okay, now I’m impressed.

The clause “Colbert remains fascinated by the Civil War” has the invisible dependent clause “even though she’s written a fictional comic instead of another scholarly study,” apparently meant for an invisible audience of fellow scholars. And the mid-life shift in course is not, as I first theorized, a decision to leave academia, but a decision to return to it. Once again, I’m impressed.

TOMORROW: The second question about Booth.