Nina Simone in Comics is a hybrid of an old-fashioned illustrated biography and a modern comics biography, written by French comics scripter Sophie Adriansen and featuring art from nineteen different European artists and colorists. It's organized into twenty chapters, covering all of Simone's life: each one starts with a vignette in comics form, a scene or sequence of events, and then a text section follows to explain that part of her life in more detail. Anne Royant provides the first and last chapters, but most artists only show up once here.
It should be clear from that structure that Nina Simone is a lot wordier and denser than the reader would expect from a book with "in comics" in the title - a positive if you want more details about Simone, possibly a negative if you just want to skim something for a quick seventh-grade book report. It also has extensive notes on sources and Simone's recording career: it is a fabulous way into her life, providing multiple paths forward for any reader interested in learning more or just starting to listen to her music.
Simone was born Eunice Waymon in 1933 in Tyron, North Carolina, to a family that already had five children and was anchored by a deep religious devotion: her mother became an ordained minister of the AME Church during her childhood. Young Eunice quickly showed a talent for music and particularly for piano, which was nourished by lessons from local teachers - which in turn had to be paid for by a "support fund" raised from her family's neighbors and friends and apparently repeatedly replenished throughout her childhood.
The family moved north after her high school graduation as valedictorian, probably partially to support Simone's ambitions to become a classical concert pianist - though Black families were moving north before and during the '40s and '50s for all kinds of reasons anyway; my guess is that was one thread but not the whole reason. She studied at Julliard in New York, and auditioned for a scholarship to Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, and was rejected. She kept studying and taking lessons, but also began playing jazz music in clubs both in Philadelphia, where she lived at the time, and over the summer season in Atlantic City. That's where the "Nina Simone" name came: her family didn't like popular music, and she wanted to save her real name for the real, "serious" career she still expected to have.
But it didn't work out that way. Adriansen wasn't quite clear if she applied to Curtis again later, though she definitely had tutors who thought she was very qualified. But her jazz career got momentum quickly, as Adriansen presents it, and she signed with a record company and recorded her first album.
Teasing out the sequence further: her failed audition was in April of 1951. Her first summer playing in Atlantic City was 1954. That first record, with the very late-50s title Jazz as Played in an Exclusive Side Street Club, was recorded in one day and released in 1959. She clearly spent nearly a decade practicing music, playing music, taking and giving music lessons, as her ambitions shifted from the concert hall to the jazz club.
Nina Simone was immediately a small success in her musical career, in the way Eunice Waymon wasn't. Simone herself seems to have thought implied racism was a large part of that, and it's very plausible: it was clearly much easier for the world to see a talented Black singer and piano player as a sultry jazz icon rather than a high-culture interpreter of Bach.
From there, it's the usual story of a creative life: problems with agents and managers and spouses and lovers and record labels - sometimes several of those wrapped up into one big problem - and shifts in creative energies, sometimes popular and sometimes not. In particular, Simone became known as a "protest singer" in the mid-60s and never shed that label afterward. But, again, she was committed and Black, friendly with Lorraine Hansberry and Langston Hughes: it's hard to see how anyone like that would not be politically active and loudly in favor of the core rights of her own people.
Her life got more complicated from the 1970s and onward, which is also the point where a biography - any biography, including this one - tends to start skipping years and covering entire creative phases in a short paragraph. Lives are long, and the early shiny moments are the most enticing: the long tedious race through middle years rarely provides as clear or exciting a story. She had a daughter, she had several failed marriages - one of which, to her manager at the time, seems to have severely damaged her career and finances right at the time the market was turning against her protest music.
She moved away from the US, eventually settling in France for the last twenty years or so of her life. (Finally explaining, to me at least, why she was the subject of such a big, ambitious book by such a French group of creators.) The end of Nina Simone in Comics mixes personal turmoil - she had some chronic issues, including what seems to be often-untreated bipolar disorder - with a series of musical comebacks, giving a mixed picture of the mostly comfortable but probably not mostly happy later years in the life of a major, transformative figure.
Every life is a tragedy, since it ends in death. But people who lived well, who accomplished a lot, are smaller tragedies: so it was with Nina Simone.
Nina Simone in Comics feels mostly like an old-fashioned biography, since the "comics" pieces here don't tell her life story by themselves. They illustrate and illuminate, in a variety of energetic, eye-catching styles, with the text features forming the core of the book. But Simone's was a long life with a lot of events to cover; I can't fault the choices here, and this book is deeper and more detailed than any pure-comics bio I've read. I have to count that as a big positive; that's the whole point of a biography.
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