3.5

Loved the illustrations. Very engaging.

The art in this biography are fantastic. This story of Audubon is made more accessible to a wider audience because it's a graphic novel. The style of the art pulls you into the story of his life, but it's the care taken to the story itself that also helps you see the man that was Audubon. Both in the beginning and the ending of the book have things that will help the reader understand why the author went a certain route in the story and helps you appreciate what Audubon did by trying to make nature accessible to more people.

1908 article The Audubon Controversy

1953 article Audubon and Wilson: Artist vs Scientist

If we've not met before, something you should know about me is that I really like birds. When I was a teenager I undertook an enormous 2-month project where I recreated Audubon's American magpie in coloured pencils on a giant piece of creamy A1. I spent hours stroking each quill onto the paper, pouring over highlights, rifling through Audubon's work to understand how he'd put similar birds to paper, how he might have enhanced the plummage on this one.
My artistic career faded but birds followed me into adulthood. When I first moved to the States, I was no longer greeted by the familiar calls of my beloved Blackbirds, Tits, and Chaffinches but by the squawks of Western Scrub Jays and the alarm-clock trill of the Black-headed Junco. The alien birds on this new continent pulled me back to Audubon, and I found myself revisiting his works as an adult. When I saw this book at the library, I had to pick it up.

In some ways I wish I hadn't.

Audubon seems to have been a bit of a twat.
He abandoned his family to pursue his drawings at a time when there was real danger in being a single mother. He endangered his staff, his apprentice. He shot dozens of the same bird for montages, hundreds over his career. He indulged in petty rivalry with a fellow artist.
He kept slaves,
which,
is resigned to an afterword in the book and doesn't make it into any panels of the graphic novel. Kind of hard to sell an historical figure to the general public when he's a slaveowner, so I guess we'll put that in smallprint at the back.

Aside from his... choices.. as a person, the book itself is just ok. The colouring and layout of each page is well thought out but, for a book about a man with such a distinct style, I found the inkwork to be very cartoonish and lacking both his precision and his flair. There is also little by way of a story when you ignore the questionable choices he makes. There are incredible episodes - literally, I don't believe they happened - which add a whimsy to the book but it's lacking in some depth. I did enjoy hearing about his feud with Alexander Wilson but struggled to see it as anything but Audubon's creation.

Ultimately, I'm left a little hollow by this work. It's easily accessible, and short, but packs little punch and skirts around the harder issues. Audubon, it seems, is another disturbing figure in history that is better judged by his art than his character.


A comparison of Wilson and Audubon's renditions of the same bird, a Carolina Parrot.

I am doing art appreciation with my son during our US Studies curriculum, and in it we had a week where we were studying John James Audubon. I heard of this graphic novel and thought it would be perfect to explore his life a bit more. I thought it was well done with beautiful illustrations, though some of the dream sequences in the book were a bit over my 10 year old's head.

A few years ago I read a prose biography on Audubon, and this decently captured the main points of his story. As with the previous read, I ended up being more interested in Lucy's story and felt Audubon was too selfish to deserve the glory he received, but still - thought-provoking life done in lovely illustrations.

As a birder, I found this interesting enough to keep me going, but then turned a bit sour at the end when in the notes the author talks about the "imagined" encounters that took place during the story. They did preface the story by stating it was a romanticized work of Audubon's life, but after finishing it one is left to wonder what, if anything was real besides some of the hardcore facts and what was just made up. Outside of that, the author and artist lack control of the graphic novel as a medium for storytelling as can often be seen by the thousands of "Hahaha" word bubbles that offer nothing to the story. That said, as a bird-nerd, I'll probably pass this down to someone - most like some children. I thought it was going to be one I'd keep on my shelves until reading the notes on the "imagined" encounters.

3.5 stars. Beautiful and simple, a quick overview of the life and work of Audubon.