James Joyce: Portrait of a Dubliner by Spanish graphic novelist Alfonso Zapico (Café Budapest), is a charming addition to the growing body of graphic biographies that explore the lives of cultural icons such as Charles Darwin, the Carter Family and Steve Jobs. Joyce's peripatetic life is particularly well suited to the episodic nature of the form.
Zapico makes no attempt to provide a Classic Comics interpretation of Joyce's famously impenetrable writing. Instead he gives a clear-eyed depiction of the life that created the work. James Joyce is surprisingly comic given its subject's struggles with poverty, censorship, literary rejection, major health problems, near blindness and his beloved daughter's mental illness. Zapico treats Joyce with both humor and respect, but does not sugarcoat the writer's drunkenness, infidelities, financial irresponsibility and cheerful willingness to bite any helping hand that came his way. Some of the most powerful portions of the work deal with Joyce's relationships with those closest to him, including his literary frenemy Ezra Pound, his brother Stanislaus, and his lifelong love and muse, Nora Barnacle, who is the most fully developed character in the work after Joyce.
The visual language of the work is sophisticated. The grey-wash backgrounds are drawn with meticulously realized historical detail while Joyce and his contemporaries are rendered with a jaunty, comic book-style line. Taken together, the contrasting styles allow Zapico to move smoothly between the comic and the tragic, ending with a bittersweet homage to Joyce's influence on Dublin in the years since his death. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins