![]() ![]() ![]() Undoubtedly he is. Guthrie is a thrilling figure, a potent musician whose own motivations would go on to inspire the likes of Seeger, Dylan and Springsteen. Hayes’ Guthrie is a rabble rouser, an outsider, someone whose upbringing was influenced by the madness of his mother and the dreamy ambition of his father. Which isn’t to say Hayes isn’t interested in Woody Guthrie. This is as much a history as a biography, as much a polemic as an entertainment, as much a spirited rant as a tale willing to take you from points A to Z. Hayes is not setting out to do what Rheinhardt Kleist did with his Johnny Cash graphic novel, I See a Darkness. What we have here is a partial biography. What’s more, he is able to turn his gimlet eye on any subject it would seem and draw from it serious, political points for the modern reader to mull over. What Woody Guthrie and the Dust Bowl Ballads demonstrates is that Hayes is no flash in the pan. Nick Hayes first appeared on our collective radar a couple of years ago with his graphic updating of Coleridge, The Rime of the Modern Mariner, a graphic novel that was so beautifully drawn and so sumptuously written even as it delivered a tough ecological message in a page turny fashion it made us wonder if he could possibly follow it up with anything as good. ![]()
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