You can almost hear Johnny Cash’s woody baritone and his heavy hand on the guitar strings reverberate through this graphic novel by German artist Reinhard Kleist. Of all the books on this list, Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness is the one that illustrates music itself best, insofar as such a thing is possible. Kleist’s sometimes-fluid, sometimes-jagged lines take the wild energy of Cash’s live shows (and of his notoriously reckless offstage life) and freezes it inside comic book panels. He even goes so far as to literally illustrate some of the country great’s songs, weaving them in among episodes from his life. As a biography, it could be criticized for touching mainly on familiar points—his failed first marriage, his drug addiction, the concert at Folsom Prison, but each episode crackles with electricity in Kleist’s hands and his dark vision of Cash’s legend will seem fresh, even to readers who know his story and songs by heart.
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