Overview

Myth and controversy still swirl around the dramatic figure of Isadora Duncan. The pioneering modern dancer emerged from provincial nineteenth-century America to captivate the cultural capitals of Europe, reinvent dance as a fine art, and leave a trail of scandals in her wake. From her unconventional California girlhood to her tragic death on the French Riviera fifty years later, Duncan's journey was an uncompromising quest for truth, beauty, and freedom. Here Duncan's art and ideas come vividly to life. Each page is a unique dance of words and images, reflecting Duncan's courage, passion, and idealism in a way sure to inspire another generation of admirers.

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9780809094974

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Reviews

Isadora Duncan and comics have a great deal in common: convention defying, boundary breaking, innovative, and seductive as hell. Which is why comics are the perfect vehicle to transmit her remarkable story. Sabrina Jones's drawings dance across the page and capture this compelling history. --Peter Kuper, cartoonist and cofounder of World War 3 Illustrated At last, a comic for the rest of us! With bold brush strokes, Sabrina Jones delineates the riveting tale of Isadora Duncan, a real life superheroine who controlled her own body, her own life, and her own mind, back in the days when most women were corseted, voteless, and stuck in the kitchen. Jones' pages are as elegant and graceful as the heroine of her biography. --Trina Robbins, author of Tender Murderers and The Brinkley Girls: The Life and Times of Nell Brinkley (forthcoming) Told with economy, precision, and humor, Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography is an impressive debut. --Harvey Pekar An admiring glance at the truncated life and roller-coaster times of the woman who traversed three continents to revolutionize dance. -- Kirkus Reviews It looks like a comic book, and it is a ton of fun. But Sabrina Jones's graphic depiction of the life of Isadora Duncan is also a serious work of biography . . . In just 125 fluidly drawn pages, Jones brings Duncan's astonishing creativity, revolutionary fervor and romantic disasters to life. --Lynn Jacobson, The Seattle Times An effective and surprisingly economical portrait of one of the seminal figures in dance and culture of the past 100 years. --Michael Gill, Cleveland Free Times A fine and balanced account for dancers, artists, and those interested in Americanrebels. --Francisca Goldsmith, School Library Journal In her debut graphic biography, Jones captures Duncan's dramatic story in an impressive fashion. Who knew plain black-and-white illustrations could come so alive, so full of movement and feeling? --Laura Koffler, Feminist Review

“Isadora Duncan and comics have a great deal in common: convention defying, boundary breaking, innovative, and seductive as hell. Which is why comics are the perfect vehicle to transmit her remarkable story. Sabrina Jones’s drawings dance across the page and capture this compelling history.” —Peter Kuper, cartoonist and cofounder of World War 3 Illustrated  “At last, a comic for the rest of us! With bold brush strokes, Sabrina Jones delineates the riveting tale of Isadora Duncan, a real life superheroine who controlled her own body, her own life, and her own mind, back in the days when most women were corseted, voteless, and stuck in the kitchen. Jones’ pages are as elegant and graceful as the heroine of her biography.” —Trina Robbins, author of Tender Murderers and The Brinkley Girls: The Life and Times of Nell Brinkley (forthcoming) “Told with economy, precision, and humor, Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography is a

Isadora Duncan and comics have a great deal in common: convention defying, boundary breaking, innovative, and seductive as hell. Which is why comics are the perfect vehicle to transmit her remarkable story. Sabrina Jones's drawings dance across the page and capture this compelling history. --Peter Kuper, cartoonist and cofounder of World War 3 Illustrated At last, a comic for the rest of us! With bold brush strokes, Sabrina Jones delineates the riveting tale of Isadora Duncan, a real life superheroine who controlled her own body, her own life, and her own mind, back in the days when most women were corseted, voteless, and stuck in the kitchen. Jones' pages are as elegant and graceful as the heroine of her biography. --Trina Robbins, author of Tender Murderers and The Brinkley Girls: The Life and Times of Nell Brinkley (forthcoming) Told with economy, precision, and humor, Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography is an impressive debut. --Harvey Pekar An admiring glance at the truncated life and roller-coaster times of the woman who traversed three continents to revolutionize dance. -- Kirkus Reviews It looks like a comic book, and it is a ton of fun. But Sabrina Jones's graphic depiction of the life of Isadora Duncan is also a serious work of biography . . . In just 125 fluidly drawn pages, Jones brings Duncan's astonishing creativity, revolutionary fervor and romantic disasters to life. --Lynn Jacobson, The Seattle Times An effective and surprisingly economical portrait of one of the seminal figures in dance and culture of the past 100 years. --Michael Gill, Cleveland Free Times A fine and balanced account for dancers, artists, and those interested in American rebels. --Francisca Goldsmith, School Library Journal In her debut graphic biography, Jones captures Duncan's dramatic story in an impressive fashion. Who knew plain black-and-white illustrations could come so alive, so full of movement and feeling? --Laura Koffler, Feminist Review One delight after another emerges. --Ken Keuffel, Winston-Salem Journal Illustration is an ideal medium for relating Duncan's life and art . . . The head thrown back in ecstasy, or her whole body whooshed sideways as if caught on the wind--here a picture speaks a thousand words. --Mary Hodges, The Brooklyn Rail

Cartoonist Jones takes an admiring glance at the truncated life and roller-coaster times of the woman who traversed three continents to revolutionize dance.Denounced as everything from a wild voluptuary to a jumping Jezebel, Isadora Duncan (1877 - 1927) famously remarked, People do not live nowadays. They get about 10 percent out of life. Every page of this admiring graphic biography reminds readers that the American dance pioneer herself always got 100 percent. The thin volume depicts a number of turbulent scenes from Duncan's personal and professional experiences, underscoring the frenetic exuberance with which she conducted her many affairs. With bold strokes and supple lettering, Jones's pen-and-ink drawings attempt to animate Duncan's boundary-smashing style, onstage and off: as the barefoot, tunic-clad artist whose free-flowing movements transformed classical dance, and as the convention-defying single mother of two and very public lover of famous figures and political causes. With this book, I'm asking a generation in flip-flops to imagine how traffic stopped when Isadora strolled down 5th Avenue in her homemade sandals, writes Jones. It's difficult to extract the truth about Duncan's life, the author acknowledges, from the diverse, often contradictory accounts supplied in the dancer's writings, reminiscences by her contemporaries and biographies with various agendas. Jones's portrait depicts a gifted artist driven by a passion to realize at whatever cost her feminist vision of the dancer of the future: woman in her purest expression, body and soul in harmony, emerging from centuries of civilized forgetfulness, no longer at war with spirituality - the highest intelligence in the freest body. Interestingly, although Jones espouses Duncan's unabashed belief that to expose is art, to conceal is vulgar, and doesn't shy away from depicting the great tragedies of her subject's life, she tends to suggest rather than explicitly spell out the dancer's more controversial actions: dalliances with women, numerous suicide attempts, proclivity for public drunkenness.A somewhat sanitized portrait; Duncan might have preferred something bolder. (Kirkus Reviews)

Isadora Duncan and comics have a great deal in common: convention defying, boundary breaking, innovative, and seductive as hell. Which is why comics are the perfect vehicle to transmit her remarkable story. Sabrina Jones's drawings dance across the page and capture this compelling history. --Peter Kuper, cartoonist and cofounder of World War 3 Illustrated At last, a comic for the rest of us! With bold brush strokes, Sabrina Jones delineates the riveting tale of Isadora Duncan, a real life superheroine who controlled her own body, her own life, and her own mind, back in the days when most women were corseted, voteless, and stuck in the kitchen. Jones' pages are as elegant and graceful as the heroine of her biography. --Trina Robbins, author of Tender Murderers and The Brinkley Girls: The Life and Times of Nell Brinkley (forthcoming) Told with economy, precision, and humor, Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography is an impressive debut. --Harvey Pekar An admiring glance at the

Author Information

"Sabrina Jones's art has appeared in ""World War 3 Illustrated,"" ""Female Complaints,"" ""Bitchcraft,"" and ""Life During Wartime."" A native of Philadelphia, she co-founded and edited ""Girltalk,"" published by Fantagraphics."

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