With Mick’s exaggerated lips, Bill and Charlie’s square
heads, and Keef’s bird’s nest scruff, The Rolling Stones always did look a bit
like cartoon characters. And between their easily caricatured mugs and equally outrageous
behavior, the Stones have always been ripe targets for cartoonists. Bill Wyman
even anthologized newspaper comic parodies of his band in The Stones: A History in Cartoons back in 2006.
Now a writer named Ceka is using the comic medium to tell a
somewhat more complete version of Stones history in a book called The Rolling Stones in Comics. Between
large chunks of text-only exposition, 21 different artists bring portions of
the story to life employing a variety of styles from Domas’s Sunday comic
section doodles (illustrating Lennon and McCartney composing “I Wanna Be Your
Man”) to Kyung-Eun Parks’s more detailed, slightly grotesque style (illustrating
the Stones’ fall out with the Marquee club) to Dominique Hennebaut’s
Underground Comix-indebted approach (Mick and Keith’s first songwriting
attempt) to the stylized yet more realistic approach of Amandine Puntous (the
Redlands bust) to Anthony Audibert’s sketchy abstractions (Mick’s alleged
dalliance with Anita Pallenberg while making Performance). It’s an invigorating mixture that makes the 1000th
retelling of The Rolling Stones’ story seem fresh again. So do Ceka’s
realistically coarse dialogue and decision to include such valuable trivia as
the real… and horrifying… explanation for the term “Rolling Stone”.
The one downside is Ceka’s tendency to sometimes veer to
close to hagiography, as when he refers to all five of the Stones as “geniuses”
(I doubt any one of them deserves that much-overused designation) or deifies
the horribly abusive Brian Jones as an angel. Fortunately, the author balances
moments such as these with sly criticisms of the Stones myth, such as a
sardonic depiction of Mick’s half-hearted and hypocritical participation in
socio-political activism in 1968. I also really dig the sections that fly away
from the main story, such as the clever explanation of Keith’s open tuning from
guest cartoon character and real musician Vincent Blanchard and Ceka’s personal
story of finding the love of his life as “Angie” spins at a party. The Rolling Stones in Comics works nicely
as a pocket history of Rock & Roll’s key band, but its narrative quirks and
far-out art are what make it special.
