The book starts with a short introduction to Krigstein as a boy, working for his father and getting hassled on the street for being Jewish. It then jumps to 1950(-ish) after Krigstein's gotten married and has been working for Hillman Comics. There's a fair amount of frustration shown as he wants to do more with his comics but isn't allowed, and his more "serious" painting is largely ignored because it's not trendy enough. He continues working as his wife has a baby, but finds things get very stressful as his wife get post-partem depression and the baby winds up being fairly unhealthy, eventually dying not long after his first birthday. Krigstein loses himself in his work and begins trying to form a union for comics creators, much to the chagrin of all the publishers. Although his wife is able to continue working as a writer, Krigstein himself is largely blackballed by everyone exept Bill Gaines. He was soon caught up in the witch hunt that was spearheaded by Frederick Wetham and eventually dejectedly left the comics industry altogether to teach. The book ends with his getting a bit of closure when he's invited as a guest to a 1976 comic convention.
D'Esposito does a good job capturing Krigstein's seeming love/hate relationship with comics. Loving the medium itself, but hating the industry. He's even given the "comics will break your heart, kid" line of dialogue that's been attributed to everyone from Charles Schulz to Jack Kirby. Speaking of Kirby, he makes a brief appearance... as do many other comics professionals that Krigstein would've interacted with. I'm not familiar enough with Krigstein's personal relationships to know if they're portrayed accurately or not, but I did like that we see not only his connections to the industry but how those relations were different depending on who they were. Particularly when it came to Krigstein's attempt to form a comics union.
I also quite liked the D'Esposito made several visual references to Krigstein's work, picking up page and panel structures. Particularly since they don't feel forced or out of place. They really only stand out at all if you're familiar with Krigstein's work already. (I don't claim to be a Krigstein expert, by the way. I recognized some references, but I'm certain I missed more than not.)
My biggest criticism of the book, somewhat unusually, is the lettering. There are several instances where word balloons are placed in a way that's counter to how they should be read. In a couple cases, they're placed backwards with the left-most balloon needing to be read after the one on the right. There's also a few shifts in how captions are written -- switching from an internal monologue to an omniscent narrator to the internal monologue of another character -- but with no visible distinction between them. It's not that hard to figure things out, but it does interrupt the flow of the story briefly each time it happens.
But overall, it's a very welcome addition to my collection. As I said earlier, I don't think Krigstein isn't celebrated enough to begin with and telling his story as a graphic novel is the ideal way (IMHO) to do that. The Outsider came out from Fantagraphics in September and should be available through your favorite bookseller. It retails for $25 US.
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