Grace
Based on the Jeff Buckley Story
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A moving graphic biography for music lovers, Grace: The Jeff Buckley Story is painstakingly researched and created in collaboration with Jeff Buckley's estate.
California, 1991. All his life, people have told Jeff Buckley how much he looks like his father, the famous ’60s folksinger he barely knew. But Jeff believes he has gifts of his own: a rare, octave-spanning voice and a songwriting genius that has only started to show itself. After he falls in love with a mysterious girl in New York, he sets out to make a name for himself outside his father’s shadow.
What follows are six turbulent years of music, heartbreak, hope, and daring—culminating in a tragedy that’s still reverberating in the music world today. Written by Tiffanie DeBartolo and with art by Pascal Dizin and Lisa Reist, this graphic novel biography uses archival material provided by Jeff’s mother, Mary Guibert, to reveal the young songwriter in the process of becoming a legend.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This effervescent graphic biography of singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley (1966 1997) brims over with creative intensity, avoiding the typical excavation of morbid details. Self-proclaimed "white trash from Anaheim," with a sweet, rich voice and soul-searching lyrics to match, Buckley struggled in the shadow of his father, Tim Buckley, a singer-songwriter with a cult following, whom he barely knew. An earnest guy with a guitar on the New York club circuit, Buckley attracted record label attention in 1992, and while his first album notched up strong sales and positive reviews, Buckley bristled at the industry's attempt to turn him into just a "pretty-boy darling of the adult contemporary charts." Unsure of his direction and increasingly anxious, Buckley moved to Memphis, where he tried to clear a serious bout of writer's block. The buildup to the fateful nighttime swim that ended Buckley's life is handled delicately and without speculative psychological profiling. The narrative by DeBartolo (How to Kill a Rock Star) only fitfully tracks Buckley's flashpan moods, leaving it mostly to the grin-heavy and high-energy Archie-inflected illustrations by Dizin and Reist to tell the story of the soaring highs that powered Buckley's music and the dark lows that may have silenced it. This alternately tragic and manic story argues strongly for the emotive singer-songwriter to be remembered as more than another casualty of the 1990s.Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified Jeff Buckley's father as an avant-garde composer.
