Fire!! The Zora Neale Hurston story

*Starred Review* Novelist and folklorist Hurston was prone to towering rage, especially in her youth, when, for instance, she whaled the tar out of her father's presumptuous young second wife. That alone makes her a fitting subject for the talents of the man who created volatile Buddy Bradley, hero of Hate comics. Like Buddy, Hurston was too impulsive to restrain herself and too smart not to feel sorry. Fiercely intelligent and self-motivating, quite fearless but not foolhardy, she managed to make herself college-educated, a successful field anthropologist in Haiti and Jamaica as well as her native Florida, and, as the author of some of the highest esteemed fiction to come out of it, a star of the Harlem Renaissance. Although very close to Langston Hughes, she eventually fell out with him over his Communist-influenced radicalism; indeed, her individualism and roots-community orientation led her to scorn, controversially, government-directed racial integration. She retained a fatal-to-her-pocketbook love of the theater (another bosom friend was Ethel Waters), and she loved to party. What Bagge can't show of Hurston's life, he writes up in a photo-illustrated biographical essay keyed by page numbers to the comic's main text. His bright, cyclonic art, equally colorful dialogue (a pale reduction of Hurston's style, he thinks), and thoughtful, personally invested commentary constitute a moving, funny, and serious introduction to a larger-than-life literary figure.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2017 Booklist

Bagge follows his previous graphic novel, Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story, with another portrait of an iconoclastic American woman. Raised in an all-black farming town before attending Howard University, Hurston became a celebrated writer and anthropologist but clashed politically with much of the black intellectual community up north. Bagge depicts her life in his iconic spaghetti-limbed, cheery-colored cartoon style. He has a frustrating tendency to hurry through the material, though: Hurston decides to launch the literary magazine Fire!! with her friends, only to be shown closing up shop on the next page, and goes from considering a marriage proposal to the thick of her first marriage in two panels. It's easy to see what attracted Bagge to the material: brilliant, outrageous, prone to visions and mysticism yet fiercely pragmatic, Hurston is an irresistible character, and Bagge's extensive, opinionated endnotes attest to his fascination. But better focus and pacing would give needed structure to Hurston's freewheeling life. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Meet Zora Neale Hurston: anthropologist who worked with Franz Boas, folklorist and collector of down-home speech and stories with Alan Lomax, novelist (Their Eyes Were Watching God), essayist and playwright, eccentric intellectual, life of the party, and exotic fashionista. Bagge bends manic, rubbery characters around Hurston's chutzpah for a warts-and-roses portrait of this fascinating woman who stirred up controversy in the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. (LJ 4/1/17) © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.