The key visual conceit is Annie’s world: black, comprising her sketchy self-image, objects she encounters rendered in a dull brown, things with which she has any kind of emotionally charged interaction (from her family to food) colored in sidewalk-chalk primaries. And more than Riel, it’s a work of immense and intimate emotional power, deeply touching and profoundly moving without ever growing maudlin or manipulative. It does so with none of the repetitive tics that marred cartoonist Joseph Lambert’s earlier work, here supplanted by the intensity of the story’s central challenge and Lambert’s own clarity of purpose in meeting it. Like Riel, it succeeds, it innovates, as comics as much as it does as biography. The Center for Cartoon Studies/Disney/Hyperion, March 2012īuy it from CCS neighbor the Norwich BookstoreĪ dual biography of deaf-blind Helen Keller and her teacher, mentor, guardian, and lifelong companion Annie Sullivan - whose own coming-of-age tale of overcoming near-blindness, abject poverty, orphanhood, loss, lack of education, and a generally piss-poor attitude is depicted in parallel with Annie’s better-known story - Annie Sullivan and the Trials of Helen Keller is the best comics biography since Chester Brown’s Louis Riel. Annie Sullivan and the Trials of Helen Keller
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