Hedy Lamarr: An Incredible Life by William Roy and Sylvain Dorange

Sometimes you don't notice the obvious things until they're absent. Most comics biographies that I've read recently use extensive captions, or sometimes almost-realistic dialogue, to orient the reader and explain where and when we are. It's the equivalent of the narrative in a prose biography, I suppose.

Hedy Lamarr: An Incredible Life - written by William Roy, translated by Montana Kane, this edition published in English in 2018 - mostly avoids all of that. It has simple captions for time and place - Vienna 1919, Hollywood 1976 - and that's about it. Otherwise, it follows more closely the standards of modern cinema, showing rather than telling, letting its actors and their scenes carry the story.

Because of that - and also because of artist Sylvain Dorange's soft, warm, invitingly rounded panels - it reads much more quickly than many other comics biographies. I found that engrossing and engaging - a biography can be, even when you're enjoying it, a bit of a slog through dates and places and names, but Hedy Lamarr avoids all of that.

It may come off slightly superficial to some readers, but I found it worked very well. Lamarr had an interesting life, with dramatic moments and quirky turns, but it wasn't all that complex. She was a smart Jewish kid in Vienna in the interwar years, she went into acting, she got away and into Hollywood before WWII, she was a star but never a notable actress in America, and so on.

The biggest left-turn is obviously her work on frequency-hopping for radio torpedoes during the war, which the book sets up pretty well. (She was interested in all kinds of mechanical things from when she was very young, her first husband in Vienna was an arms dealer so she was very familiar with how torpedoes worked, and she connected with an avant-garde composer with experience synchronizing pianos that turned out to be highly relevant.) It's not clear if that work was used during the war, or afterward, for its intended purpose, but her research and patent was public, and eventually was the basis for later communications systems, including wifi.

If I was going to criticize Hedy Lamarr, it would be that we don't get a great sense of what kind of person Hedy was once she was a famous actress. Roy mostly sees her from outside in this book - it's a friendly depiction, but informed by gossip columns and scandal sheets, so we see her running about, marrying over and over again, fighting with studio heads, but we don't really know what was going on in her head, what she wanted to achieve.

And then, like so many people, there are the long years post-fame, which Roy and Dorange cover quickly and somewhat superficially - again, very much from outside. But that's the thing about a biography: anyone who has a good long life will have long stretches where what they were doing - whatever that was - will not be relevant to the book, and for most subjects, those stretches will become longer and longer and more and more common as their lives go on. That's just how fame and fortune works in our world.

I am the kind of person who, when once asked "what famous Hollywood person, living or dead, would you most want to have dinner with" actually did say "Hedy Lamarr." She had an interesting, distinctive life, did notable things, and was clearly smarter than a lot of people gave her credit for. All of that is admirable, and all of that comes through well here.