Kleist’s drawings capture the violent, chaotic mood of Cave’s early music.

The core of the book deals with The Birthday Party and the eventual shift into The Bad Seeds.

The book mostly focuses on the beginning of Cave’s career, so it’s more madman hitting audiences with microphones and less-sophisticated crooner in a suit. You often see the same moment from a few perspectives. They tell their stories of watching him go through life, getting to the moment they were created. And for Nick Cave, a character who is larger than life, I wouldn’t have it any other way.Įach chapter is narrated by a different character from Cave’s body of work, upset that they were killed, as is almost always the fate of being in a Nick Cave song. The novel has a “Big Fish” feel to it, combining fact and fiction to say something true about the person. So I had very high hopes for Reinhard Kleist’s graphic novel biography of Cave, and Kleist did not disappoint. Nick Cave is my favorite musician of all time. It covers the musician’s childhood in Australia, his time fronting The Birthday Party, his time with The Bad Seeds and his battle with heroin.Reviewed by Kyle Thompson, The Great Escape In typical graphic novel style, the publication features dramatic hand-drawn imagery in panel comic format, starring Nick Cave and characters from his songs, all in black-and-white. He adds: “Closer to the truth than any biography, that’s for sure! But for the record, I never killed Elisa Day.” Nick Cave gave Reinhard biographical information and creative advice for the book, and comments on the final result that Reinhard has “blown apart the conventions of the graphic novel by concocting a terrifying conflation of Cave songs, biographical half-truths and complete fabulations and creating a complex, chilling and completely bizarre journey into Cave World”. The book, titled Nick Cave: Mercy On Me draws elements from the musician’s life story as well as his music and writing, much like previous books focused on Johnny Cash I See in Darkness and Somali athlete Samia Yusef Omar An Olympic Dream. German graphic designer and comic artist Reinhard Kleist has created a graphic biography of Nick Cave, published by SelfMadeHero.

Nick Cave by Reinhard Kleist