Me and the Devil Blues Volume 1

Rating NR Genre graphic novel Author Akira Hiramoto Publisher Del Rey

According to legend, if you stand at the crossroads with your guitar at midnight, the devil will take it from you and tune it; when he hands it back, you'll be a master guitarist, but you'll be missing a soul.  According to another legend, Robert Johnson did just that to become an expert bluesman.  Akira Hiramoto tells you right up front he's going to take liberties with the story - the subtitle to this volume is “The Unreal Life of Robert Johnson,” and the back cover describes it as a “phantasmagoric re-imagining” of Johnson's life.  Unless you're very familiar with the story, telling the real legend from Hiramoto's re-imagining is nearly impossible, but the overall effect is impressive.

Hiramoto's twist on the classic “the devil will teach you the blues” myth is inspired.  When we meet Johnson, he is an unhappy man, escaping fights over money by sneaking out at night to blues bars and leaving his pregnant wife home alone.  His friends tell him the legend of the crossroads, which he calls ridiculous, but when bluesman Son House leaves his guitar behind in the bar, Johnson tries to take it to him.  He doesn't find House, but he does find himself at a crossroads, so he decides to test out the legend.  Of course, it doesn't work.  He can't play the guitar any better.  Depressed and exhausted, he collapses in the dirt.  He wakes up in the street, dusts himself off, and heads home.  When he gets back to town, he finds that he hasn't been gone all night - he's been gone six months.  His wife and baby both died during labor, and everyone in town blames him for running off on his family.  They run him out of town.  Johnson has lost his friends, his wife, and his unborn child - when he picks up his guitar, he discovers that now he knows how to play the blues.  The devil kept his part of the bargain after all.

At this point, the story moves from playing with the myth through extended metaphor to playing with history.  Johnson is playing his guitar outside a little store when a white man hears him and asks him to come for a ride with him.  Hiramoto does an excellent job of letting us live with Johnson's fear that he's being taken to a lynching (a legitimate fear, we discover later, though not immediately).  Turns out the man wants Johnson to play at a party to distract the guests while he cleans the owner's house out; also turns out that this man is Clyde Barrow.  The heist is cut short when Johnson suddenly stops playing.  The guests ask for some country music, and when Johnson tries to play it, his right hand sprouts five extra fingers (phantasmagoric re-imagining, indeed).  Johnson and Barrow escape, and after a night on the run (during which, Johnson plays a blues tune that Barrow calls “Bonnie's Blues,” in case we had any doubt about who was robbing houses), they end up in a dry town that isn't very welcoming to outsiders.  Johnson ends up in a jail cell, and the volume closes with the townsfolk getting ready to drag him out for a lynching.

This isn't a place to learn Robert Johnson's story.  If you know the story, though, this volume has that special appeal of the familiar yet unpredictable.  The art is beautiful, which adds to the overall effect.  As odd a take as this is on the Robert Johnson legend, the combined effect of the wonderful illustrations and the twisted (in many senses) storyline make this a compelling read.