Billie Holiday was written in Spanish, originally published in 1991. It's had editions in English since then - I have no idea if it's always been the same translation. This one is from NBM, and came out in 2017. It includes a long discursive introduction about Holiday by Francis Marmande, who I gather is a prominent French writer on jazz. The introduction tells us her story in an in-your-face, demanding style - not unlike the book itself, though in a different way - probably in part because the comics pages themselves will only lightly touch on that story.
This is a biographical graphic novel, or bande dessinee - Holiday was a real person, and this book tells stories from her real life, as true as any other book about historical people. But it's not her whole life, or a carefully-organized life: it's scenes from her life, mostly out of context, as understood or experienced much later.
Holiday was a jazz singer, and writer of her own songs - among the best of all time in the former, and not too shabby at the latter. She was Black and a woman in a time when either of those things was a burden and both were an iron cage. She was an addict and a stormy personality, I think - the book and the introduction are more poetic about it - which didn't help, but who ever min-maxes their own life to be the most successful version of themselves? She achieved a lot. She fought hard. She died young.
This book is about her only at a distance, for all she's on a majority of the pages. A reporter is working late at night, thirty years after her death (so in 1989 - farther back from our today than Holiday's death was from his), suddenly having to write a feature article about her for the anniversary, for some unnamed publication that clearly is really bad at planning out their editorial calendar. The book we read is...his thoughts as he writes that article? What he learns about Holiday that long night? Somehow that article as transmuted into comics pages? I'm not sure the frame story actually makes any sense, or is necessary: we don't need to have Holiday's story mediated by some white guy thirty years later.
But it's the way Munoz and Sampayo told this story: it's the way we get it.
Think of it as a jazz improvisation, I suppose: talented creators stepping up into the spotlight, picking up their instrument, and playing the melody, but doing it their way, however feels right, that night and on that stage.
We only see Holiday as an adult, only after she's already famous. The scenes are not dated, but seem to be basically in chronological order. Call it mostly the 1950s; the last decade of her life. It's mostly set at night, mostly at times when things aren't going well for Holiday. Almost as much about her great collaborator and friend Lester "Prez" Young, as about her alone - maybe what I mean is that it's largely about his influence on her, though Holiday comes across as someone who would not let herself be influenced, who did what she felt she had to do (songs or men or drugs or whatever) at the time, no matter what the consequences.
Sampayo provides that quirky structure, the story that flows around and through her life, the frame-story of someone presumably not all that different from Sampayo himself, considering this story so many years later. Munoz provides the atmosphere: he's one of the most distinctive artists in the world, tormented sweaty faces emerging from his blocky, utterly compelling slabs of ink.
This is probably a book largely for people who already know at least the outline of Holiday's life; you won't learn things very clearly here. Or, more obviously, for fans of other works by Munoz and Sampayo.
The best way to discover Holiday is through her songs: I'd recommend "Strange Fruit" or "Crazy He Calls Me" or "Easy Living" as places to start.
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