James Joyce: Portrait of a Dubliner by Alfonso Zapico (review)

The most humorous and heartfelt of the recent Joyce-inspired graphic novels has finally been released in English. Alfonso Zapico’s Dublinés, published by Astiberri in 2011 and winner of the Spanish Comic Prize, has been translated by David Prendergast and entitled James Joyce: Portrait of a Dubliner.¹ Zapico researched and worked on this graphic biography of Joyce for over three years, traveling through the cities where the author lived (including Dublin, Rome, Trieste, Paris, and Zurich), sketching scenes, and filling in historical background and cultural details. He also published La ruta Joyce, a travel diary about his experiences while researching Dublinés.²

Zapico draws gorgeous close-ups with his thick, rough outlines and minimalist details in a cartoon format. He reinterprets famous scenes many Joyceans know by heart and presents them in a fresh way. His list of source material is surprisingly short: Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, David Norris and Carl Flint’s Joyce para principiantes (Introducing Joyce), David Pierce’s James Joyce’s Ireland, and Kieran Hickey’s Faithful Departed.³ Yet he features all the key figures and events in Joyce’s life without being overwhelming or overly didactic. Zapico’s work has a cinematic quality, and, in many ways, reading his book is like viewing a pleasurable documentary about an author shaped by being a part of “a grey nation, a paralytic society, [and] a reactionary Church” (53).

The illustrations are particularly helpful for distinguishing the people in Joyce’s periphery. Zapico starts with the history of Joyce’s great-grandfather, grandfather, and father—details that can easily be mixed up, given the repetition of names and the complicated family tree—but the artist presents the three paternal ancestors on one page, with illustrations. Joyce’s great-grandfather, the first James Joyce, is presented with his muttonchops and broad shoulders, looking very much like a Cork version of Mr. Darcy. The grandfather appears just below, more dapper, less roguish, with neatly parted hair and thumbs on his lapels, ready to do business. And then at the bottom is John Joyce, Joyce’s father, with considerably less hair than his dashing ancestors, a mustache that conceals the lower half of his face, and an awkward side-glance, as if already failing to live up to the reputations of those who preceded him.

As enjoyable as his sketches are, Zapico takes few risks with the art style. The black and white panels, page spreads, speech bubbles, and captions read the same throughout the book, so that, given his writing about such an experimental author, one wishes that he experimented more with form itself.

The text offers a “Who’s Who” of all the important people who touched Joyce’s life, and it is immensely helpful to have faces to attach to the names: from Joyce’s relatives and early friends (George Clancy, Francis Skeffington, Thomas Kettle, Constantine Curran, John Francis Byrne, and Vincent Cosgrave) to the figures who played roles in his later life (Jenny Serruys, Natalie Clifford Barney, Adrienne Monnier, Rémy de Gourmont, Madame Ludmila Bloch-Savitsky, Paul Valéry, and André Spire) (26-27, 150).

In Portrait of a Dubliner, Zapico utilizes basic black-and-white cartooning, along with a typical linear structure, consistently sized art panels, and traditional speech bubbles and captions. He does include touches of whimsy, such as his way of drawing people walking with one leg exaggeratedly stretched out in front, showing the bottom of the shoe, and the other leg bent back at a ninety-degree angle (as depicted on the front cover)—reminiscent of Joe Matt’s style in Peepshow.⁴ Zapico, however, capitalizes on the strengths of cartoons to offer a perspective beyond what the reader can glean from the text alone. For example, in an eye-surgery sequence, Zapico offers a crowded image of buildings, streetlamps, cars, and pedestrians—a cinematic long shot. By contrast, the next panel zooms all the way in on...