Review by Ian Keogh
Journalist David Randall’s introduction highlights Nellie Bly as someone still to be admired for being a trailblazer, a woman whose outstanding journalistic career spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries and who proved a remarkable business woman also. She’s someone who not only deserves to be remembered, but whose activities should be actively taught as an example. Unfortunately Luciana Cimino and Sergio Algozzino’s graphic novel biography isn’t the informative delight one would have hoped.
Cimino’s way into her story is via a journalism student at Columbia University extremely persistent in attempting to interview Bly in 1921, just before her death. Miriam is a fictional construct representing the difficulties faced by female journalists decades after Bly blazed her trail. It’s a viable method of summarising a career of significant achievement, although unless actually based on a real encounter, it’s surprising that Cimino would dramatise events occasionally, one being assumptions about Miram’s background. Otherwise Cimino delivers a well researched skim through the first half of Bly’s impressive career, stressing a determined and capable personality willing to look at matters with a different eye.
To begin with, then it’s the art that’s problematical, although in some respects this may have been down to Cimino’s script. In an afterword Algozzino writes about process, about the thickness of his line and about how digital creation enabled richer colours, but he’s not seeing the wood for the trees. He draws elegant and expressive people, paying attention to clothing and styles, and individually each panel is well drawn. Algozzino, though, approaches The Incredible Nellie Bly as an illustrator, not a comic artist. There’s very little deviation from portraits of people, and the possibilities for producing something more are always shunned. It’s most apparent when detailing Bly’s achievement in traversing the world in 72 days. Rather than embracing travel, anecdotes from the trip and the places visited, the journey continues to be depicted via head and shoulders illustrations and a montage blending landmarks from Rome and London. It reduces the magnificent to the mundane.
However, Cimino also bears some responsibility for The Incredible Nellie Bly not being as good as might be. Miriam’s story becomes a clumsy insertion, and the accounting of Bly’s life after a failed romance is reduced to little more than a list. Post 1890 she married a much older industrialist with failing health, cared for him and rescued his business, wrote numerous novels, and returned to journalism. She was a social activist with a conscience who applied her principles to her business, and reported during World War I. Most of that is absent and what’s present is mentioned in passing, the war journalism represented by a single quote and a spread of a soldier’s grave.
Skimpy and artistically disappointing, there’s a gap in the market for a far more comprehensive graphic novel recounting Bly’s achievements.
