Love in Vain

November 21, 2016
Everyone knows that Robert Johnson supposedly met the devil at a crossroads and that’s where he got his gift for ungodly guitar playing—to this day, his skill seems almost supernatural. Dupont’s graphic biography of America’s most infamous bluesman doesn’t aim to answer that question, although it suggests that the answer would be “hardship and hard times.” The basics of Johnson’s brief life are detailed in a dark and almost succulent level of prewar woodcut-style detail by artist Mezzo. Dupont’s intimate and prying narrative tracks Johnson’s life closely from his dirt-poor Mississippi youth through his later vagabond years as a womanizing roamer and guitar slinger. Dupont takes an interventionist role in the narrative, interrupting it to provide his own opinion and noting where the biographical record is incomplete. The key question of the devil’s involvement is left for readers to decide.

Starred review from November 15, 2016

He made a deal with the devil, says the legend, the source of his skill. Johnson played, sang, drank, and seduced his way through mostly black juke joints and music gatherings, dying at 27. He left recordings of 29 influential, iconic blues songs. DuPont's sometimes rhyming words find perfect realization in Mezzo's dramatic black ink drawings, suggesting Lynd Ward's engravings and Charles Burns's Black Hole. Older teens and up.

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