Nicolas Finet

I really don’t know much about Janis Joplin beyond the basics of Texas girl who went to San Francisco became a huge star, and died young from an overdose. After working my way through this uneven graphic novel biography I still don’t really know too much more beyond confirming that she seemed to have a self-destructive personality.

Maybe it’s a result of translation from the original French edition but this was a frustrating read. Narratively it jumped around from place to place with no explanations (more captions would have helped) while the overarching narration was at times too exposition heavy.

There is also a lot of people who rotated in and out of the story without context of their influence or impact on Janis. 45 of them are included in a “character gallery” of mini biographies at the back of the book, but this information would have been better served woven into the narrative itself.

I think it suffers from the creative team being so familiar with their subject that they included references, verbal and visual, assuming that the reader would understand them - but to the casual reader it just caused confusion and left you wondering what you’d missed.… (más)